Category: General stuff

Chain my hash#

isi / / General stuff, wearedb

[This post is a note to self] – Blockchains are a type of ledger. Coin “miners” make calculations and add messages to the blockchain over time. The messages are hashed to protect the ordering and contents of messages. These hash ledgers are (allegedly!) tamper-resistant as the contents of later entries depend on the contents of earlier entries.

The novelty (in comparison to conventional dbs) is that it is a distributed system with no owner. This is what enthusiasts mean when they say that the blockchain is trustless: instead of central authority, like a bank, many miners compete to successfully write a new message to the blockchain. They do this by means of a proof-of-work algorithm, each with their own copy of the ledger.

Blockchains capture the previous digest and the current message to produce another digest.

About the need to disagree better

isi / / General stuff

How to disagree well: 7 of the best and worst ways to argue

Paul Graham, Harvard Ph.D programmer and writer, proposed that the web is turning writing into a conversation, with the internet an unprecedented medium of communication. In particular, it allows people to respond to others in comment threads. And when we respond on the web, we tend to disagree. He says this tendency towards disagreement is structurally built into the online experience because in disagreeing, people tend to have much more to say than if they just expressed that they agreed.

Interestingly, even though it might feel like it, the world is not necessarily getting angrier. But it could if we don’t observe a certain restraint in how we disagree. To disagree better, which will lead to better conversations and happier outcomes, Graham came up with these seven levels of a disagreement hierarchy:

Graham viewed his hierarchy as a way to weed out dishonest arguments or “fake news” in modern parlance. Forceful words are just a “defining quality of a demagogue”. By understanding the different forms of their disagreement, “we give critical readers a pin for popping such balloons.”

Read more about this here.

PS: I’m a sucker for AdHominem : / I need to get better at this, I want to debate from the top only.

Long term observe

isi / / General stuff

I don’t believe in Astrology, or horoscopes. But what I thought the other day is that if China is one of the few cultures that went on for millennia without major interference or change, their long term observations have been closely colported and transcribed over generations and generations. So if they say that every 12th generation certain character traits in humans reappear, I actually consider that a possible proposition (not sure if true tho).

When I look at generations now, at grandma, mum, daughter, child, and see how certain personal qualities or peculiarities jump over one or two generations, I consider it possible that, if you made this real research and monitored long term data of psychological evaluations and references, you might get to the conclusion that very particular human traits reappear every 12th generation.2016 Chinese Year of the Monkey Mind you I am not trying to make the case for snake oil sellers here, but question what the basis for this widely accepted and longstanding compartmentalising might be.

Continue reading “Long term observe”

How not to social media

isi / / General stuff

The only social media platform I use is Twitter. I enjoy chatting with people, which is exactly why I like Twitter: wordy tweeps come together, to meet and have a conversation. Even follow each other at times.

But hey, sometimes this ease just does not work out, and you end up completely misunderstood, even considered a creep. Last night the cookie monster -of all tweeps- got me totally wrong, and thought I’m a full-on weirdo. When that happened I mentioned it to my [#IRL] friends afterwards, and they just started laughing, cos they know me as the founder and first member of the planetary no-evil federation.

So nothing is easy, no even the easy things.

If life gives you crumbs, just suck em up.

monster
PS: Dear Cookie Monster, I made cinnamon rolls as per your flickr post, I also have high regards for Leonard Nimoy and his work, and I truly hope you don’t only have another 10 years to hang around.
PSPS: smokes suck anyway.

Smart no more

isi / / General stuff

Watching my fellow humans dawdling away on all their electronic devices and doohickeys whilst developing the attention span of a fruit fly, I already had the vague feeling that us humans we’re not spinning upwards anymore… well now here’s an article by Tia Ghose @ LiveScience who had the same feeling, and investigated it…

Humans may be gradually losing intelligence, according to a new study.

The study, published in the journal Trends in Genetics, argues that humans lost the evolutionary pressure to be smart once we started living in dense agricultural settlements several thousand years ago.

“The development of our intellectual abilities and the optimization of thousands of intelligence genes probably occurred in relatively non-verbal, dispersed groups of peoples [living] before our ancestors emerged from Africa,” said study author Gerald Crabtree, a researcher at Stanford University, in a statement.

Since then it’s all been downhill, Crabtree contends…

Read the whole article here http://www.livescience.com/24713-humans-losing-intelligence.html