Thanks. My productivity just went into a corner and shot itself.

I've been reading less of ycombo news lately since it was just mostly articles on how to get VC funding and recent hoopla, and not really interesting things on the edges/fringes of markets, society, and technology. Imo, those are what you have to pay attention to, in order to have any type of gauge as to the probable direction of the future.

I've submitted a share of "interesting" things, but they're usually drowned out by "easy reading" Hopefully, the human editor factor will allow the proposed indirect control of the swarm.

I've had some interesting discussions over at octonews--but it's a different niche--hardware/sci/tech/health. I'd love it if yc.news is able to turn itself into hacker news. I had missed the mid 2006 reddit, and hearing great insight is often more valuable than the actual article itself. Not that how to fill out a term sheet, analysis on facebook, or top ten things to get started on your startup isn't interesting, but one can only take so much of that in the last 3 months.

I cheer the new direction

I actually started reading /. again a while back. The quality of the discussion there has gone up quite a bit ever since the kiddies and trolls defected to Digg and Reddit.

A web server that isn't very powerful.

Maybe the reason is that the enterprise market is downstream. They're not the trendsetters. If you get all the individual users using Macs, eventually big cos will have to switch. Just as happened with desktop computers, in fact.

So maybe Apple ignores this market because they know they'll get it automatically (but only when) they're the default for individual users.

I like new name, but honestly dont think the content itself will change very much. I've noticed most submissions are generally hacker-centric anyway, although having the name of the site reflect this probably more accurately hones the focus. I think generally the content being submitted will be a reflection of the type of users using the site, regardless of the official mission statement. Manually moderating only goes so far...

Considering that, I would personally like to see this site make a conscious effort to remain "grass roots" rather than focus on growth. I love this forum because of the relatively high concentration of smart people who post here. I doest look like PG has any monetary objectives with this site (hence no ads), so I think simple word of mouth between hackers rather than deliberate promotion will keep content quality higher going forward.

The proposed rating system is brilliant.. I give props to whoever thought of that one!

Edit: I just realized that the new weighted voting system could have an unintended chilling effect on voting.. If smart users worry that placing a vote might adversely affect their "vote weight" on a post deemed by the admins as a dumb story, they might just refrain from doing so all together.

This also explains the Fine-Tuned Universe.

An interesting property of a simulated brain is the simulation can take an arbitrarily long amount of time. You can update in virtual "Planck timesteps", even if in real time this takes a million years. Any simulated brain won't be able to tell, because it doesn't get any updates in between these steps. Time becomes a property of the system you're simulating... Just like in reality.

It might take until the Sun goes Red Giant to run your single lifetime simulation.

The speed of light is a convenience for updating the simulation in discrete steps. Particle/wave duality "deciding" upon observation is just lazy evaluation, like in Haskell. Quantum entanglement is no mystery when distance is virtual. A Universe where the speed of light is a hard limit can still contain a simulated Universe where it isn't.

Why do we want virtual worlds? Properly implemented and convincing, we can do away with suffering altogether. We can "live" in a world that seems fully real, but in which no-one is actually suffering because everyone else is simulated. All our needs are met and all our desires are fulfilled.

The mistake we keep making is that in order to create convincing AIs to inhabit the world with us, they actually become as sentient and conscious as we are; being virtual is no barrier to feelings or emotions! [1]

Thus our creations want to create a simulation to live in themselves, so they won't suffer, either, and so it goes like a perpetual zoom on a fractal set.

[1] To convince yourself of this, consider a matter replicator that copies every single atom in your body. You'd create a clone. It would be thinking and feeling just as you do. Now consider a computer simulation of a single atom; if that can be done, then by extension, it would be possible to simulate anything made of atoms. A simulated clone of you would also behave the same. The neurological activity that occurs in your "real" brain when you feel or think would also occur across the virtual atoms in the brain of your virtual clone. In fact, that would involve real electrical activity taking place among real atoms making up the RAM chips and CPUs "containing" the simulation of the virtual clone. Thus any simulation at the same scope or nesting level as yourself is as real as you are and therefore its feelings are just as valid. [2]

[2] By further extension, if your simulations are as real as you are, then your simulation's simulations are as real as it is, and thus a simulation at any nesting level is as real as one at any other -- a simulation inside a simulation is still running on real atoms with real electricity!

I don't know if they'd want to be outed, but as you might expect I'll be one of them.