Month: January 2016

Lists are the new search

This in turn reminds me of a story in the New York Times, many years ago, about small Japanese shops who wanted only word-of-mouth customers and so made themselves hard to find (even by Japanese standards). In particular, there was one denim shop in a back-alley of Tokyo called ‘Not Found’ – so as to be ungooglable. One can call this curation, or hipsterdom, or just a Veblen good. But in the past, such things were always geographically constrained – you had to live in a big city (while chain retail took homogenized versions of the same thing to everyone). I wonder, as ecommerce matures, how much will be carved out into exactly the kind of spectrum of large and small retail beyond the big aggregators, and how far this removal of geographic constraint might make it easier rather than harder for them to take sales from the giants, in part by removing that density problem. That is, there might be a lot more lists, they might be hard to find, and not be part of some global aggregator, and that might be OK.

syzkaller

syzkaller is a linux kernel fuzzer, and it is finding TONS of bugs. the whole “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” is clearly total bs, since there aren’t many eyeballs at all. but with this, maybe there’s some hope to get a kernel that is substantially more secure and less crashy.

Nonrival Goods

My previous post, which answered the question, “Why has growth has been speeding up?” made no use of the concept of excludability. So why did I make such a big deal about partial excludability in my 1990 paper? At least since Marshall handed down his Principles of Economics (arguably since Adam Smith told the story of the pin factory), economists have fretted about how to reconcile the increasing returns associated with what Smith called increases in “the extent of the market” with the obvious fact that in real economies, lots of firms of all sizes compete with each other. One of most important things about growth theory that I learned from Chad Jones is that this question is separable from the question about why the growth rate has been speeding up. Speeding up follows from the 2 key properties of production possibilities that I emphasized in that post–combinatorial explosion and nonrivalry. These are facts about the physical world that nature gives to us, provided we recognize that part of what nature gave us was the amazing capacity to humans was the ability to codify things we learn in words that other humans understand. What Chad pointed out in an aside that I will never forget is that that to understand speeding up, it is enough to take a specification of the production possibilities, attach an objective function, and just solve a social planner’s problem. All the reasonable proposals for decentralizing an equilibrium have a path for growth that is qualitatively similar to the path that solves the planner’s problem. If your production possibilities give you a solution to the planner’s problem with a growth rate that speeds up, you will be able to come up with a decentralized version that does so too.

Pentagon Celebrates 25 Years Of Bombing Iraq

Bringing together the many civilian leaders and military strategists who helped them reach such a historic milestone, Pentagon officials held a lavish black-tie gala Sunday at which they commemorated 25 years of the United States bombing Iraq.

Hundreds of active-duty and retired military officers, high-ranking members of the past 4 presidential administrations, and executives from top defense contractors reportedly gathered in the grand ballroom of D.C.’s Fairmont Hotel to dine, mingle, and celebrate a quarter century spent routinely dropping 1000s of tons of explosive ordnance across the Middle Eastern nation—from the Jan. 17, 1991 onset of airstrikes in the Gulf War to the current bombardment of suspected ISIS targets.

Petabyte Brain

The brain’s memory capacity is in the petabyte range. Salk researchers and collaborators have achieved critical insight into the size of neural connections, putting the memory capacity of the brain far higher than common estimates. The new work also answers a longstanding question as to how the brain is so energy efficient, and could help engineers build computers that are incredibly powerful but also conserve energy.

Too much evidence

more evidence can reduce confidence. The basic idea is simple. We expect that in most processes there will normally be some noise so absence of noise suggests a kind of systemic failure. The police are familiar with one type of example. When the eyewitnesses to a crime all report exactly the same story that reduces confidence that the story is true. Eyewitness stories that match too closely suggests not truth but a kind a systemic failure, namely the witnesses have collaborated on telling a lie.

Antivaxxer Spam

it turns out antivaxx nonsense has always been an auto-generated scam:

HealthMe’s business model is to make an automated program that runs through every single drug and every possible side effect, scrapes the FDA database for examples, then autopublishes an ad-filled web page titled “COULD $DRUG CAUSE $SIDE_EFFECT?”. It populates the page by spewing random FDA data all over it, concludes “$SIDE_EFFECT is found among people who take $DRUG”, and offers a link to a support group for $DRUG patients suffering from $SIDE_EFFECT. Needless to say, the support group is an automatically-generated forum with no posts in it.