Redesign of MailChimp - <AUTHOR> http://mailchimp.com/ <comment><USER2> I liked the old site A LOT better. This one seems slightly amateurish and too artsy. Why a big blue hue on everything? This isn't art class, and we don't need to see their creative side.

Show me a cute monkey, show me emails.... Don't drown me in blue!

I'm looking at the site on a 1680X1050 display, and I cannot see WHAT the site is about... It did not occur to me to scroll down, because it seems to "end" at the fold, what with the boxes that typically precede the footer being there and all. No one looking at the site will have _any_ clue what MailChimp is or does. Their logo doesn't appear above the fold, the word "email" doesn't even appear above the fold! I don't know what they think they did!

<comment><USER3> They sacrificed a TON of usability in order to become this artsy. I am not sure why since art has nothing to do with email--especially not business email.

The worse example of this is their feature tour. It is actually very painful to read now with way too much space wasted on illustration that contribute nothing. I couldn't find a single screenshot of the app.

I sure hope they are split testing this.

<comment><USER4> I think artsy is the wrong word. It's just more muted, pastel and common.

As of my check, there is a giant chimp mascot on the front page, so they might have changed that, but the rest just looks like 50% of design shop redesigns from the last 3-4 years.

The massive title on the home page is "Still free, just bigger." Still free what? Spell it out for people.

I, like almost everyone commenting here, preferred the older design and personally would've run with tweaking that for the next 2-3 years rather than pushing out a redesign for the sake of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am agnostic on which will work better for the business, but I have an emotional connection with Chimpy. Chimpy is so instantly lovable that my mother can recall, two years later, that my B2B mail service provider is "the one with Chimpy." I have a Chimpy t-shirt that my girlfriend _specifically requests I wear_.

I am not a designer or a brand guy, and I'm willing to be convinced by an A/B test showing Faceless Corporate stomps all over Chimpy... but crkey, I would think long and hard about giving him up.

<comment><USER6> I believe I have the same Chimpy tee-shirt (grey AA?) which is one of my favorite teeshirts ever in terms of design and comfort. Such a great mascot, and instantly recognizable as Mailchimp. Are they giving him up for good?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Screenshot of previous design for comparison: <http://i.imgur.com/aeKr8.jpg>

I agree with the general sentiment here. I'm baffled and confused why they made this change. The reason I happened to have a screenshot is because I keep a folder of images of sites I think work exceptionally well. They lost both their usability as well as their humanity. That's a double whammy. I'd love to see a post from them explaining the redesign and any results that may come from this.

<comment><USER8> I heard they drastically downplayed their well-known chimp branding and color palette because they'll soon be making a big play into a white-labeled offering which will be totally without branding and customizable. This site redesign is the middle ground to acclimate existing customers to the big change before they roll out the updated app with white-labeling offered.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure what the connection is between white-labeling a product and rebranding oneself, if white-labeling is essentially stripping the product of the brand to be replaced by the brand of the customer.

Unless it's simply to appeal more to a new set of customers, particularly ad or PR agencies, which is a totally legitimate reason for this rebrand. But even in that light, I prefer the previous site, which instills a no-nonsense level of trust.

But this is just my opinion on the brand aspect of the redesign. I think everything else they've changed and added with the site are excellent, particularly the resource section which feels like a library of manuals. The customer stories in video format is a great idea too, though I was confused by the actual videos, which simply did not get to the point of how they related to Mailchimp, at least not as long as I watched before getting bored and stopping the video.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> They should have A/B tested the new design v/s old design. It is so trivial to do that I am amazed why companies take huge risks going with an unproven new design.

<comment><USER10> They do have multiple designs right now, just try to refresh the site. I'm guessing they are keeping track of the conversion rate on each of the designs and will change them once they have enough data points.

<comment><USER11> Those don't appear to be multiple designs, but a single design which randomly features different "stories."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> They should just silently revert and pretend this never happened.

<comment><USER13> You know, they'd get tons of goodwill for something like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> You could not have done a worse thing to their previous branding an image, which I thought was pretty damn good in the first place. Nowhere on the homepage does it tell me what MailChimp actually does. The content font is pretty small, and hard to read many of the times. The feature and resource pages are painful to browse. All these artsy images are absolutely unnecessary. Even the guides themselves are actually pdf books you have to download, formatted in artsy ways, making the entire process of searching for help and answers really, really unpleasant. They've sacrificed tons of usability.

I'm a bit shocked that they'd do that, personally.

<comment><USER13> It could have been intentional. For instance, if they saw themselves being painted into a corner in the future, businesswise, they may want to make a branding break with their past sooner than later. They can always foreground the chimp, the color blue (or whatever) later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> There seems to be a trend in design the last few months (GAP, American Apparel, NBCUniversal the other day) and now MailChimp joins the ranks of people who throw out existing, awesome brands. The monkey is still somewhat present on the page, but this is really a downgrade from the old page. It definitely doesn't look good, and it completely disregards all the brand equity they've built up. It's too bad, because they had a great brand that I really responded to, even though I wasn't even a customer (I just realized I have recommended the service multiple times without even using it).

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't mind the design but how about a sentence near the top to new visitors know what MailChimp is. (I see the video further down the page)

</comment><comment><USER17> Is it fair to assume that the "Powered by Happy Cog Hosting" implies Happy Cog was behind the redesign? Potentially irrelevant, but curious.

Regardless, I agree. This seems like a step back. I'm a huge fan of Mailchimp, their brand (well, to date), and the way they engage their users (aka "support"). Mailchimp is known for their ease of use, but this design doesn't reinforce that, especially the overuse of imagery (ref: <http://mailchimp.com/features/>).

Mailchimp has been known for their transparency (ref: <http://blog.mailchimp.com/going-freemium-one-year-later/>). I hope they share their decision process on this, or metrics on the new design, or both.

<comment><USER18> Happy Cog had nothing to do with the redesign. It was completed 100% in-house, and while I'm not exactly sure what DesignLab® has in store, I think you can expect some additional insight into the their thought/design process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The site has certainly lost some of its quirky unique design and feel. It looks more like a thousand other websites now, and seems to copy a lot of 37singals. I do understand they are huge now and so have to appeal to a broad group of people, but overall it does feel a little boring and corporate.

It is certainly a safe design that will appeal, but it does appear to have lost some of its brand appeal.

</comment><comment><USER20> Cool stuff! We've used mailchimp at my old office. Aside from one hiccup that caused our emails to be delayed, we've had a great time setting it up.

We had production ready templates in about 20 minutes! Keep up the good work guys!

</comment><comment><USER21> From 2008, when their current logo was designed by John Hicks - <http://blog.mailchimp.com/new-mailchimp-logo-by-jon-hicks/>

</comment><comment><USER22> Horrible - I don't know how or why, but I feel less likely to recommend the new MC than the old. I felt the old was a good mix between Aweber and Campaign Monitor, now they look exactly like CM, but worse.

</comment><comment><USER23> New site does not appeal to me at ALL.. I like the old site a loooooot more.

Why did they lose the Chimp? I don't get that. They literally built their brand around the "Chimp". They've lost their identity (the chimp) ;P

</comment><comment><USER24> At least I can still get the old site at (note the www): <http://www.mailchimp.com>

I think the new site looks even worse when you can compare them tab to tab..

</comment><comment><USER25> The internal site was hit over the head with the pastel bat, too. They should revert their CSS changes -- the prior look was consistent and usable.

</comment><comment><USER26> Design looks nice, if a little rushed, artistically but completely misses the point of the business.

</comment><comment><USER10> There seems to be multiple designs, try refreshing the site to see some of the other ones.

I don't like the new designs, when i first saw the "Designer templates" one I actually had to check the url just to verify that I was still at mailchimp.com and not some generic design tutorial site.

</comment><comment><USER27> Terrible.

The design is fine, though uninspired.

But what makes this terrible is that it is without soul.

Bring back the chimp!

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't know why companies who aren't selling ads would choose a video platform other than Vimeo or Youtube. But I do know the customer stories look like I'm watching RealPlayer in 1998. And I'm on screamingly fast tubes in the middle of the country.

I give the design a thumbs up, FWIW.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm interested in what the rationale behind expanding the free plan is.

</comment><comment><USER30> wow! I love it. Looks sleek and elegant. It also doesn't look like everything else on the web. Nice work on the branding.

</comment><comment><USER31> Don't like it, prefer the old design...

</comment><comment><USER32> "If ain't broke don't bother fixing it"</comment>


Best scam I've ever seen - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/expected-randomness/fbd96787075a

<comment><USER2> The fact that the letter says "You may have been selected to receive this special limited time offer because of [...] This is an advertisement to extend your coverage." didn't give it away?

</comment><comment><USER3> Where are the scammers getting the data indicating the resident listed at this address drives a Toyota Camry? Obviously they don't have the data linking the car make to the owner, or else the mail would be addressed to the fiancé of the author rather than the author himself. I wonder if they are using a simple Name:Address mapping (certainly not hard to obtain) and then indexing the color and make of the cars with Google maps.

Clearly the data for name/address pairs and car/address pairs come from different sources. Otherwise there would be no false positives like the author's letter.

(Also, why don't they just use a different phone number for each letter? Or even sets of 3 letters?)

<comment><USER4> Whoever sold/delivered the car/warranty/service plan/loan to you sells your information to these sketchy companies. So they know where you live and when you bought the car and which car you have. From that they deduce when your original warranty is likely to expire and send you the scam letter.

In this case, since the author didn't actually buy the car, maybe he took it in to get it serviced and THEY sold his name, address, car make to the scamsters (or something like that).

<comment><AUTHOR> Forgot to comment on this early on. My current address is actually not associated with the car in any, absolutely any way. Either they looked up unrelated sources, or it came directly from Sausolito, where I once got a parking ticket (the only reference to the current address for this car). Strange.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Legitimate business correspondence generally doesn't have threatening language on the envelope quoting penalties under 18 USC for "obstructing with delivery of this letter". Something like that would end up in my recycling bin without even getting opened.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've received a few of these in the mail, but the fact that they were clearly from a third party made me trash them immediately. It's interesting to hear that they don't even provide the extended warranty they are advertising.</comment>


Over 2,500 Pulse Secure VPN endpoints vulnerable to CVE-2019-11510 (critical) - <AUTHOR> https://badpackets.net/over-2500-pulse-secure-vpn-endpoints-vulnerable-to-cve-2019-11510/ <comment><AUTHOR> 818 unique autonomous systems (network providers) were found to have vulnerable Pulse Secure VPN endpoints on their network. This vulnerability affects U.S. military, federal, state, and local governments agencies, public universities and schools, hospitals, major financial institutions, and other Fortune 500 companies.</comment>


CurveCP implementation committed to Google Chrome repo - <AUTHOR> http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/net/curvecp/

<comment><USER2> <http://curvecp.org/> for more info =]

<comment><USER3> Nice. I couldn't find the description on how long-term public keys' sharing will avoid man-in-the-middle attack. It's unclear how clients will obtain long-term public keys from new servers and how servers will obtain long-term public keys from new clients? What if long-term keys will be compromised or updated? Is there keys' revocation procedure?

The page <http://curvecp.org/security.html> says literally the following regarding man-in-the-middle attack: "The client knows the server's long-term public key in advance, before making a CurveCP connection. Servers that differentiate between clients know the clients' long-term public keys in advance."

I cannot imaging how all servers can know all clients' (billion of clients) long-term keys?

<comment><USER4> Apparently "by using DNS CNAME records to prepend the CurveCP elliptic curve cryptography public keys to the DNS names of the DNS servers." <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNSCurve>

<comment><USER3> OK. How this prevents from man-in-the-middle attack on public keys sent over untrusted network? Can you point me to the description of the protocol aimed against man-in-the-middle attack during long term public keys' distribution? Let's say we have a server with a public key S and a client with a public key C. How can they prevent man-in-the-middle attack when exchanging their public keys over untrusted network?

I couldn't find any relevant details regarding this question on the official DNSCurve site <http://dnscurve.org/> .

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fascinating. Too bad NaCl means something entirely different in the Curve CP world than in the Chrome world.</comment>


Is This the End of Airbnb? - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.co.uk/article/airbnb-coronavirus-losses <comment><USER2> Clearly they're spending a lot of money, and maybe they'll need to do layoffs and/or other budget cuts to make it through this, but I imagine Airbnb will actually come out of this even stronger relative to the rest of the hotel industry.

They don't own or lease buildings the way other hotel chains do, or have their own maintenance or cleaning staff, so they've got to be losing less money per unit right now while everything is shut down. If some hosts over-extended themselves on mortgages for their rental properties and get foreclosed on, that's not really Airbnb's problem. They may even get bailed out by the government, which then directly benefits Airbnb.

And in the medium term, I think their booking rates might bounce back quicker than other hotels. In a world where the lockdowns have lifted but we're still recommending/enforcing social distancing in most places, which could last years, I imagine the demand to go and stay in a traditional, crowded hotel in Paris or NYC is still going to be pretty low. Business travel may not pick back up very quickly, as companies cut costs in the recession plus they've seen how meetings can mostly be done fine remotely. Massive conferences with thousands of people seem unlikely to happen for a very long time.

But people will still want some kind of leisure and vacation. Renting a house or cottage a couple hours away on a lake or in a small vacation town is a relatively safe thing to do where you can maintain social distancing pretty well, which is the scenario where I'm most likely to use Airbnb instead of a hotel.

On top of that, local governments have bigger problems to worry about than short-term rentals right now, so Airbnb may also get a couple years break from their constant legal battles with various cities.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Where do you want to be, in a hotel around a bunch of strangers? Or in a house where you can keep distance from other families? We tried to rent a house down south (SC, GA, FL) where we could have a pool and our kids could swim, but most states have no short term rental orders in effect. As soon as those lift I think you will see certain properties bounce back. No hotels for us until this thing clears up.

<comment><USER4> >Agreed. Where do you want to be, in a hotel around a bunch of strangers?

Personally in a hotel because I at least know that the hotel is going to be cleaned.

<comment><USER5> A hotel being cleaned is a person you don't know entering your room every day and breathing all over everything. I'd much rather a single house where you can do a deep clean yourself on the day you move in and then be sure nobody except yourselves have entered the house until you've left.

<comment><USER6> Same here. What if Airbnb has option where you pay extra for a deep clean before you check-in from approved vendors?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I still can't wrap my head around the fact that they have 14,000 employees. Fourteen thousand. For a company that owns no hotels or motels, no real-estate (other than their offices, of course). The website is decent (but no amazeballs), which is all there is to AirBnB (other than customer service, of course). I don't understand why this all can't be done by, say, 1000 or so employees.

<comment><USER8> Current employee here. The employee count is actually 7000, half of what you stated. Not sure where you got 14,000.

<comment><USER6> and a big chunck is contractors or low-level customer support right?

<comment><USER8> Yes, most is non-tech

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> But why it's burning hole in the finances? AirBnB is all marketing. Scale down your cloud instances and don't spend on ads? What exactly burning money at the rate of 1B per month? It's not clear from the article at all.

<comment><USER10> I'm sure it doesn't account for 1B a month, but paying employees is really expensive and airbnb has a lot of them

<comment><USER11> 1B a month just in employees is over 100k employees making 100k a year. i know the tech ones make more but i assume the customer support makes less. that's a lotttt of employees

<comment><USER12> it's not quite that simple. if an employee makes 100k a year in salary, they cost much more than that to the company - the company has to pay for payroll taxes, health insurance, any benefits like PTO or free food, not to mention all the infrastructure the employee uses like the office building, electricity, air conditioning, etc. according to a comment above, airbnb has 14,000 employees. that's a lot of office space and benefits to be paying for. and that's just the employee costs, not counting anything else

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The question they should be asking is will this kill Marriott and Hilton's recently launched AirBnB competitors?

While I'm sure Marriott and Hilton will get a ton of federal money they've got a ton of real estate mortgages to deal with right now. It would be pretty easy (especially if these efforts don't have a lot of traction and are costing a lot of money to keep afloat) to just shut them down.

</comment><comment><USER14> Airbnb

If infection does not confer immunity could we be looking at the end of:

Hotels, Shopping Malls, Eat in restaurants, Bars, Amusement Parks, Move Theaters, Clubs, Theaters, Public swimming pools, State and National parks, Beaches, Air travel, Train Travel, Bus Travel, Recirculating HVAC systems, Office buildings, Pro sports, college sports, high school sports, sports in general, gyms, parties, funerals,

Just to name a few.

</comment><comment><USER15> Just remember why they started, a bloke could not afford to pay his rent. There was a popular conference and he offered to let someone stay at his house sleeping on an airbed.

It was a hack. If the economy stays bad for a period of time both travellers and host will need an Airbnb or similar. Travellers want cheaper accommodation and host will need the money.

</comment><comment><USER16> airbnb is not a bad business, as a localized venture. imagine each city had it's own version of airbnb run by the local city council. not some vc funded, destroy regulations & rental market at all costs, company. a city owned short term rental market would be both beneficial to cities, tourists n hosts. aye, if there's any salesperson out there wanna partna on to build a platform we can sell to cities, I"m open.

<comment><USER17> The hotels in any city would lobby to kill any sort of government intrusion into the private sector like that.

On top of that cities prefer nice compartmentalized systems, short term rentals are hotels, long term rentals are apartments. City planners designate different areas for different use cases, airbnb style rentals go against this and raise all sorts of problems. This is one of the major reasons why cities generally dislike airbnb.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have an Airbnb booking for December 2020. Would it be best to cancel now when there is still a chance of a refund?

</comment><comment><USER19> Let the invisible hand of the market sort it out. Don't bail, let them fail.

</comment><comment><USER20> One can only hope.

</comment><comment><USER21> The end? I could only wish.

That this social cancer was allowed to fester for so long means it will just raise it's ugly head once again when conditions are right.

</comment><comment><USER22> I hope so. It's cancer on our society.

</comment><comment><USER23> in bali, hotels are now offering 3,000,000 rupiahs for 30 days stay

that's about 6-7 usd / day

no breakfast / food / mineral water cleaning every 2 weeks

minimum airbnb price floor is like what? 10 usd / day?

that's 50% more expensive than hotel chains in bali for months to come</comment>


[FOR GIT USERS] YoLog – Lightweight Wrapper to Beautify Your Git Logs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/karandesai-96/yolog/ <comment><USER2> Wow ! This serves as a very lightweight plugin to git. I am no expert at handling git related manners. I am a layman who adds, commits, pushes, pulls.

Thanks for this beautiful and compact representation. Cheers :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad that you liked it :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nope, don't like it. The built-in git commit log is plain but space-efficient, displaying all you need in a small number of columns. If you want a commit graph you can get it just fine with git log --graph.

Short, this doesn't seem to to do anything you can't do with plain git already and what it does is not as good as what git does by default.

Edit: apologies to the project maintainer btw, but I really don't see the point.

<comment><AUTHOR> I respect your opinion. I had a personal desire for a colourful log, and wanted better customization. Initially I set an alias and was good to go, but then I just sat for two hours and packaged it using setuptools.

For future versions I am planning one command change in the theme of git logs, and possibly setting up themes through config files.

The resulting library is a mere 5 KB in size and I got a hang of writing 'yolog' and getting the output :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is what I added to my ~/.gitconfig. Achieved similar results.

[format] pretty = format:%<(10)%C(yellow)%h%Creset %<(100,trunc)%s %<(30)%Cblue%ad%Creset %C(magenta)%ae%Creset

<comment><USER2> I tried it, yours is a bit different, if your columns are smaller than the size you declared it leaves that extra white space, while yolog autofits columns.

I like refs better than email. Thanks for informing, i cannot understand this syntax, can you provide a link to understand ?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can see pretty formats in git log's documentation:

[https://git-scm.com/docs/pretty-formats](https://git-scm.com/docs/pretty- formats)</comment></comment></comment>


The Importance of Surviving 40 more years - <AUTHOR> http://www.lettersfrompeter.com/theory-human-lifespan/ <comment><USER2> Forty years is incredibly optimistic. But beyond that issue, I don't see how transferring my brain to a computer does anything for me. I don't want a copy of me to live forever, I want to live forever _myself_. Copying my brain won't copy my conscious self. (It can't; after all, if you can make one copy then you can make ten copies.)

<comment><USER3> Ship of Theseus argument applies here - done gradually enough there's no perceptual difference between a brain running in a computer and on a biological substrate. You 'die' in that sense every time you lose conciousness - a different you wakes up.

I think we have a much better chance of extending human life biologically in the next 40 years than we do running the brain in software. 100TB for a brain map is extremely optimistic - that's assuming a byte per connection, and I bet it's a lot higher than that.

Like effective fusion power, it's always 50 years away, unfortunately.

<comment><USER4> Another instance of me is not me; everyone will think it's me (I will think so too, however I see a nice psychological Philip K Dickian mess coming up with you thinking the rest of your life that you are not you) but it's not. I wouldn't really care at all for that kind of 'immortality'.

I don't remember which sci-fi book it was, but I read that book (or story) a long time ago where the brain itself was, in a flash (no losing consciousness), turned into a kind of 'plastic'; literally every part, so you are you and after that nano machines would create the new cells, destroy others and create connections from that plastic mimicking the exact way the brain works. Give me one of those.

<comment><USER5> I think the point here is, that even the you from "now" and the you from "a moment ago" aren't the same. Consciousness is an illusion.

<comment><USER4> But like someone else already said; it doesn't solve the dumping of the brain and the feeling of self. Copy the brain onto a different substrate (I have no problem seeing that as a real possibility) but after you did that the two 'you's (one human, one something else) look at each other and only 1 is you. There is no magic 'soul' or whatever flying over during the transfer taking the self with it. The clone you won't believe it's you as he/she is aware of the procedure. And the original you will die as every human always did before.

Maybe someone has some good articles about this, but I have a feeling they mean to slowly (for the definition of slow applicable here) replace tissue in the brain so you gradually turn 'silicon' (or whatever it may be) and 'hope' that it mimics every cell close enough and slow enough so that you will remain you after the transition? In which there will never be 2 'you's in this process, however it will be possible to clone/backup your brain after the process? I'm concerned with the 'hope' of it being like this and it would be very optimistic to think we can reach this kind of understanding of the brain within 40 years imho.

<comment><USER6> >but after you did that the two 'you's (one human, one something else) look at each other and only 1 is you.

Why? A copy of me IS me.

>There is no magic 'soul' or whatever flying over during the transfer taking the self with it.

The information in your brain IS your soul, basically. What else defines "you" if not that?

>Another instance of me is not me; everyone will think it's me (I will think so too, however I see a nice psychological Philip K Dickian mess coming up with you thinking the rest of your life that you are not you) but it's not. I wouldn't really care at all for that kind of 'immortality'.

I can not understand this preference, it just makes no sense to me. As long as one copy of me lives on that is all that matters. It doesn't matter _which_ copy. The specific atoms that make me up don't matter. Why would it matter if I live on being made up of one set of atoms or another?

<comment><USER4> I don't think I agree with you; you are doing a magical movement of 'self' here. Even a sharing of 'self' in your first example. If there is 2 copies of you then 1 of you is you, the other is not. The thought experiment is very simple; sit yourself in a chamber with a glass mirror; your side says 'original' the other side says 'copy'. You are aware you will be copied in 1 second. The other you appears on the 'copy' side of the mirror. The original (you) now _knows_ that the copy is the copy as he saw this process. And the copy knows he's the copy as he always is aware of the process the same you are.

So you are talking either in a way where the 'self' is shared (both think they are the original even though that contradicts their own knowledge) or you don't care if you die as long as a clone of you lives on (but then you _will_ die; for you as the original 'self' it's lights-out). The latter is not immortality to me, at least no more than having kids (which is actually a big reason many people have kids) and the first makes no logical sense.

<comment><USER6> Your thought experiment doesn't really prove anything except that you can have two identical beings in the same room and they can be aware they are made of different atoms. But they are still the same person.

Perhaps you are hung up over the fact they diverge by a few seconds of experience? I would trade losing some memories for immortality. People take drugs or suffer from brain damage which has similar effects and I don't consider them "dead". In any case making a copy of the person is likely to be a destructive process, so that isn't even an issue (there's no reason to keep your physical brain after you upload it to a computer.)

Making a copy of the person isn't any different than if I just took the person and replaced all the atoms in their brain instantly with different ones. Hell this could be happening to you every second and you would have no idea. (In our universe, at least, it isn't even possible, since atoms are all identical and don't have little tags saying "atom 1250". I'm just trying to give an idea why basing your identity on a physical object makes no sense.)

If you don't consider your experiences and brain state to be you, and you don't consider the physical object of your brain to be you, then I have no idea how you define personal identity.

[http://lesswrong.com/lw/pm/identity_isnt_in_specific_atoms/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/pm/identity_isnt_in_specific_atoms/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What's wrong with dying ? I mean, obviously people want to live longer for some (mostly selfish) reasons, but isn't dying part of the 'living' deal ?

Dying is similar to being born - your whole universe changed when you transitioned from womb to this world and the same happens when you die. In other words, they have cookies and chocolate there :).

The whole deal about spirituality is that one discovers that we are in fact immortal and that this life is a step of an infinity of other steps, before this life and after.

The other thing one realizes is that each individual is actually a facet of an infinite whole (some call this God, but it is actually You), or in other words - We are all One.

That's what all the religions and mystics have been telling us for millenia.

<comment> ux-app > _" What's wrong with dying"_

It's such a terrible waste. All that knowledge accumulated over years of life... gone. We don't know what the species is capable of if we could double or triple human life span. What if we could indefinitely extend the most productive years? Where might we be if we could have given Einstein the chance to live hundreds of years with his mind and body in prime condition?

> _" same happens when you die. In other words, they have cookies and > chocolate there"_

wouldn't it be great if that were the case? Unfortunately there is exactly zero proof of any kind that this is so.

> _" each individual is actually a facet of an infinite whole, in other words > - We are all One"_

This sentence is completely free of information.

> _" That's what all the religions and mystics have been telling us for > millenia."_

Religions and mystics have been exploiting the normal human fear of death for millennia. Science might one day give us the keys to finally dodge that inevitable final bullet.

<comment><USER7> >Unfortunately there is exactly zero proof of any kind that this is so

Oh but there is for those who seek it!

One kind of proof is called dimethyltryptamine. It lasts for 10 minutes, but when you come back, you might have a radically different view on these matters.

Other psychedelics, like LSD, also offer a different perspective on life and death and there are also different kinds of spiritual work one can do - meditation, holotropic breathing or living life in nature. They all help you realise just how fragile and transitory life is in nature and that that is a good thing.

>Religions and mystics have been exploiting the normal human fear of death

Isn't science (or rather scientists) driven by the same fear ? Isn't the knowledge that we're going to die a factor in making us go out and do stuff to survive ?

Wouldn't immortality lead to a state where we'd have to invent a simluation of mortal life in order to actually feel alive ?

How can one tell that this life isn't such a simulation ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good article series on the limitations of mice as research animals - [http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_mouse_t...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_mouse_trap/2011/11/lab_mice_are_they_limiting_our_understanding_of_human_disease_.html)

I also came here to say what greeneggs already stated about the digital brain - _I_ want to live forever, not have a copy of my brilliance survive for future generations (though I'm sure they'd be grateful).

</comment><comment><USER9> The human brain is designed to live inside an innervated body. It receives constant updates on how the body is doing, and unconscious processes, some of them chemical, control every aspect of our internal life, from homeostasis, to the perception of time, to breathing, mood and muscle tone. Upset one part of that balance and the brain goes into blind panic. Although the brain also has electrical activity, it is not just a sophisticated computer program running on a general purpose computer. For one thing, the hardware is unique in every individual! Secondly, what makes you you? And what is consciousness? We have no idea. Perhaps it is not possible to reconstruct the real you, rather than an emulation of you, without copying the exact quantum states of the atoms in your body. But this may require complete destruction of the old you and construction of an identical quantum copy elsewhere (teleportation), which is hardly an electronic download of "data" into a computer. You might be able to extract your memories and store them in a Von Neumann architecture, but the rest is a pipe dream.

<comment><USER10> Still beats dying.

<comment><USER4> Might not do. There have been experiments with people with mental issues or just general experiments abusing or cutting nerve endings in different ways and a lot of the more radical ones (like this would be, at least for the first 1000s of subjects) end up in insanity. And you would rather be dead I think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Once the brain is understood well enough to be modeled digitally, it stands to reason that the complete set of data representing an individual person (at a particular state of time) could be copied or transferred just like saving a file."

What exactly are you going to save to that file? Positions of molecules? States of atoms?

Oh, so we're assuming we can abstract away from the physical system? Either we abstract or we save everything. Well, what's everything? Or can the abstraction be "good enough"?

<comment><USER12> It's scientifically certain that we _can_ abstract away from the physical system. In fact, we're already doing that today. We run simulations of molecular interactions all the time. We can even "do" a cortical column in incredible detail.

The problem is not that we don't know whether it's possible. There are two issues concerning this development: we need to know what the right detail/abstraction level is for simulating a mind, and once we do we need to actually get that information. Doing the simulation itself is comparatively easy, though certainly not trivial.

 _> What exactly are you going to save to that file? Positions of molecules? States of atoms?_

To be useful, it can't be just a file, it needs to be a database that can be executed. Positions of molecules seems to be the right detail level according to our current understanding. That includes the spatial configuration of proteins and their exact position in relation to another. But there might not be that many unique molecules to store, just a few thousand maybe.

An interesting question then becomes how can we abstract these scans even further and still be able to have a high fidelity mind simulation?

<comment><USER11> We can abstract however we like whatever we like. The point is: will the abstraction accurately represent the original physical system? And how do we know? We run simulations of molecular interactions. So what?

<comment><USER6> Why wouldn't it? It wouldn't be _exactly_ the same, but the important information is there. Does it matter if it's slightly off?

Consider that your real brain is influenced by tons of random factors and meaningless information. If a protein drifts to a slightly different location maybe it could slightly affect the output of that neuron. But if just assume that it is where it is supposed to be for the purposes of the simulation, it should be fine.

It's not like something like that encodes any important information or has anything to do with the algorithm that your brain is running.

<comment><USER11> The points are

1\. We're limited by our own models of physics. We can only record what we know about. That's a pretty significant issue when you're _trying to simulate physics_.

2\. In physics, we can run an experiment over and over again so as to refine our model. We isolate systems and _try_ to study simple interactions. When you study gases, for example, I think you will find that things are modeled statistically. We record details to the extent that they help with our model.

What I'm wondering is how we would do this with biological systems. Can you run the "experiment" over and over to try and understand the "right way" this biological system was supposed to behave? Is there a "right" biological system? How do you know what the relevant biological (sub)systems are? How do you identify what's important? How do you abstract? What's a "good enough" replica?

What I'm trying to get at is that I don't think there is a good layer of abstraction for biological systems. I think the physics is the only good layer of abstractions. But...

3\. If we had to record states of molecules, for example, then making a digital copy of everyone seems really not feasible. It doesn't seem feasible because of memory or computation.

<comment><USER6> I think you could abstract to the individual neurons or maybe the different parts of the neuron. It doesn't matter that you don't have an _exact_ physical simulation of every atom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I find the simple-minded dogmatism that the mind = brain hugely amusing. The fact is that right now science has absolutely no idea how consciousness works. There is no proof that reductionist materialism can explain how a mind arises from bunchs of neurons. And yet some believe without proof.

<comment><USER6> Are you suggesting that intelligence _can 't_ be explained by neurons or physics as we know them? Seriously?

<comment><USER13> Yes, seriously! Look into the work of the philospher David Chambers. His position is called non-reductive functionalism. Instead of saying "the brain causes consciousness", he would say "it is not ONLY the brain that causes consciousness".[1]

In other words "consciousness is a fundamental property ontologically autonomous of any known (or even possible) physical properties" of the physical universe. [2]

I am amused by discussions like these where simplistic functionalist arguments [3] are taken as being proven. The whole area of consciousness is still side open, _none_ of our current theories are adequate and it is simply wrong to assume that consciousness can be explained away.

[1] - [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1997/may/15/conscio...](http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1997/may/15/consciousness- and-the-philosophers-an-exchange/)

[2] - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers)

[3] - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism_%28philosophy_of_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism_%28philosophy_of_mind%29)

<comment><USER6> I am very confident that the human brain is responsible for all human behavior. That's the simplest explanation by far.

You'd have to explain a completely new and different set of physics that no one has observed before, and explain how and _why_ evolution found it and took advantage of it (and yet no one has ever observed it before), and how it interacts with the body, etc.

It just makes absolutely no sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> That would be extremely boring to live endlessly. Farewell services must be introduced, exciting ways to go "events". :)

then you wake up as a yourself from copy

Would you be more afraid to loose it? Right now you will die anyway, we accept that(some more, some less). Some build fear based communities around death.

Would everyone regress in preserving "life" instead of being bold and exploring where no man would go. What gives if I get deadly radiation poisoning, I might discover something. What gives if I drown in my new innovative diving gear, this shit is revolutionary.

I rather do nothing on that sort if I can live forever, I will be as safe as possible, taking no risks?

But, there is saying about crossing bridge when one gets there.

</comment><comment><USER15> This reminds me of 1900-1950 prognoses that by 2000 we should all have flying cars and apple growing on Mars. These prognoses were inspired by rapid advancements of the technologies of that time. Instead electronics happened which was not imagined or at least underestimated.

Nowadays prognoses are inspired by current advancements but let's just spell out the one thing we can be pretty sure about - we have no idea what the next big thing is.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is all great, but where does the number of 40 come from? After all Kurzweil said it'd be in 20-25 years and he's got more street cred :)

<comment><USER4> Kurzweill is 65, so he has 20-25 years to live probably in the currently system; figures he would say 20-25 years. The blog owner probably thinks he has 40-50 years more to live so is gunning for 40 years. I remember Larry Ellison mentioning 20 years for such a revolution in a speech some years ago. People are less likely to say 'in 100 years' if they won't make that themselves. 1000 years is easier to talk about than 'just' after you're dead yourself, but what would be the fun in saying 'in 1000 years' ; no-one would listen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm a little skeptical of this whole mind uploading business. How do we really know consciousness isn't in the brain, anyway? I prefer to achieve immortality by not dying, like Woody Allen.

<comment><USER18> Consciousness is in the brain; the idea here is to simulate the brain, resulting in the mind.</comment></comment>