It seems I can't get a dinner anymore without overhearing talk about blockchain. One point I keep hearing that irks me though is that government wouldn't restrict the crypto industry because of how much money they could make by letting it flourish.  That is just wrong on so many levels.  Whether a law exists or not has nothing to do with making money.  It doesn't matter if everyone got paid or the government gets a cut.  Otherwise by that logic, you might as well say the government should let drug trafficking and black markets flourish because of "how much money they could make."  It's like if a cop let someone go for stealing because the cop got a share.  As long as everyone gets a piece, what's the harm? Unfortunately this kind of thinking seems to be the norm in crypto and really just finance in general, where right or wrong is decided solely by whether money is made.

Marble Machine by Wintergatan (@wintergatan)

If a few hours on a larger planet with higher gravity can be years on Earth, then any advanced alien life is most likely from a smaller planet with much lower gravity than us, where each year for us can be millions for them.

Sound is just a concept, a label to a group of molecules moving together in tandem.  There is no "thing" called sound that actually travels.  It's just a domino effect.

After splitting my time evenly between New York, San Francisco, and LA for about three years, a semi-humorous comparison of the three cities.

NYC	SF	LA
Money, status, and 9-5 life.	Make the world a “better” place.	I just want to be “happy.”
Honor and integrity.	Self-righteousness.	Whatever's popular.
Luxury.	Minimum viable product.	Comfort.
Live to work.	Work is play.	Work to live.
Passions are just hobbies.	Careers are passions.	Passions are careers.
Dreams of a desk job + hobby.	Dreams of saving the world with an app.	Dreams of fame and popularity.
Podcast stars.	Tech stars.	YouTube stars.
Lack of adventure.	Lack of imagination.	Lack of authenticity.
Authority, rules, and norms.	Tech and "social validation."	Feelings and feel good.
Hardened.	Pampered.	Doesn’t want to move.
Weight on shoulders.	Guilt chipped at every turn.	Room to breathe.
Unfairness is part of life.	Fight unfairness with unfairness.	Unfairness is ok if I benefit.
Too busy to meet you.	Too important to meet you.	Too lazy to meet you.
Does it make money?	How's it improve society?	What's it got to do with me?
Repackage and relabel.	Create new and uncharted.	Consume and regurgitate.
Mechanical Turk.	Machine automation.	No automation.
Man on foot fetched by app.	Autonomous cars and drones.	Laundry machine finally w/o coins.
Backup servers in the same building.	Backup servers across the globe.	Not my problem.
GPS doesn’t work.	Can’t drive w/o GPS.	Can’t drive with a GPS.
Drives well without tech.	Tries to follow GPS into a river.	Drives past you 4 times at full speed.
Four seasons.	Fog.	Smog.
City never sleeps.	Even the mall closes by 8pm.	Pockets of life in wasteland.
Can get 3 things done a day.	Can get 10 things done a day.	Takes all day just to get somewhere.
Subway goes everywhere.	Subway literally on one street only.	"Subway."
Trains frequent and on time.	Buses late and rarely come.	Bus driver laughs and tells you to chill.
$1M for a studio apartment.	$1M for a closet.	$1M for house of cheap wood.
Old but functional buildings.	Spends to look like a warehouse.	Actually is an old warehouse.
Having elevator operators is normal.	Sewage smell every block is normal.	Paper-thin walls & roof leaks normal.
People everywhere.	Siren noises everywhere.	Motorcycle noises everywhere.
Homeless give speeches.	Homeless scream and grab at you.	Homeless rant about politics.
Rats on the subway tracks.	Needles and human feces on ground.	Garbage on every sidewalk.
Musicians jamming on street corner.	Homeless peeing on street corner.	Get shot on street corner.
Celebrate with festivals.	Celebrate by vandalizing own city.	Celebrate by being stuck in traffic.
Orderliness in desperate times.	Violence in the name of justice.	Punch whoever’s in closest proximity.
Compassion for your neighbors.	Compassion for anyone except your neighbors.	"Compassion" for the hand that feeds you.
Shop away your tears.	Celebrate your failures.	Take pride in your weaknesses.
Spend free time killing time.	Spend free time working.	Spend free time "chilling."
Board gamers.	"Gaymers".	YouTube gamers.
Broadway.	N/A.	Hollywood.
Silicon Alley (Midtown).	Silicon Valley (Entire Bay).	Silicon Beach (Santa Monica).
Wall Street.	Embarcadero / SOMA.	N/A.
Brooklyn.	Oakland.	Los Angeles.
Service oriented no matter what it is.	Doors open wrong way (fire hazard).	15 minutes just to get the menu.
Decent food at all prices.	Expensive food or crap food.	Expensive crap food.
$15 for 2 slices of toast and sides.	$15 for just the toast.	$15 for burnt toast.
Apologizes for bad service.	It's a feature, not a bug.	But I already got your money. It's mine.
Your fault for being different.	Your fault for being in the way of progress.	Your fault for letting me get away with it.
High cultured.	Mono cultured.	Blurgh-whatever cultured.
Rules.	Numbers.	I tried.
Punctual.	10 minutes late.	Hours to days late.
Passive aggressive.	Aggressively passive.	Blatantly shameless.
Conformatively independent.	Independently conformative.	Misery loves company.
Backed by what famous people said.	Backed by correlation = causation.	Backed by gut-feel.
Sales pitching in casual conversation.	Lectures w/out knowing anything about you.	Always talking about the sun and weather.
"Helps" by telling you it's not possible.	"Helps" by telling you to change your goal rather than achieve it.	"Helps" by just saying random positive things.
Offended by how you do things.	Offended by your opinions.	Offended by your success.
Trying to politely be impolite.	Trying to save you from yourself.	Trying to justify taking from you.
Because you're uncivilized.	Because you're literally a bad person.	Because you have more than enough.
Don't see it, so it's not true.	Didn't hear a word you said, but this is the answer.	Everything's subjective, so I can't be wrong.
Mind your own business.	Forced democratized access to your life.	Willingly sacrifice your life for fame.
Think of how others remember you.	Think of your impact on the world.	What’s it matter if you die anyway?
At least I have manners.	At least I'm politically correct.	At least I have an opinion.
B+ on everything.	Always either A+ or F.	A for effort.
Everything works half decent.	Half new, half assed.	At least there's the beach.

Another story I watched play out like a movie in my dream - ironically this one about a character dreaming...

A man lives his life through many lucid dreams.  In them, he is aware he is dreaming and can pick the setting or story he wants to live in.  One thing he can't control though is that the dreams seem to randomly end and reset.  While he keeps his memories from past dreams, no one else in the dream seems to remember.  Over time, he starts noticing a person who is always in the dream.  It starts off with them just passing each other by, walking in the same direction, or other small coincidences, but eventually they end up in the same scenes or situations as well.  She ends up being the only constant between each dream, and they share many adventures together.  However, whenever he tries to talk directly with her and figure out who she is, the dream cuts off.  It doesn't help that she also always forgets everything as well, so every...[More]

Watched Alex Garland's "Annihilation" and enjoyed seeing similar ideas as my Immortality essay about death as a programmed flaw in cells.
https://www.pftq.com/blabberbox/?page=Steps_to_Biological_Immortality

Seems all inspiring directors actually know many subjects well, as opposed to being specialized like schools keep pushing.  Just have to go down the list and look up the bios on Garland, Christopher Nolan, Hideaki Anno, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and others to find out all of them are extremely multidisciplinary.

Also interesting in the below article that his shooting of "Ex-Machina" cost only $10M.
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/jan/11/alex-garland-ex-machina-interview-the-beach-28-days-later

Puts some perspective on how ludicrous a lot of the crypto/VC projects are for costing hundreds of millions, sometimes billions, with nothing to show for except for the PhDs and branding.

For those interested, below are also really good reads that show the director is extremely intelligent/rational.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/markhughes/2015/04/25/ex-machina-director-talks-gender-nazis-and-collaborative-filmmaking/#72146b376c65
https://www.quora.com/Ex-Machina-2015-movie-At-the-end-of-the-movie-why-does-Ava-ask-Caleb-to-stay-in-the-room-Mark-Hughes-What-if-the-gender-roles-were-reversed/answer/Mark-Hughes-1

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#Annihilation @annihilation_x @ExMachinaMovie

Had #FLStudio freeze suddenly - I think while auto-saving. Almost lost my work but opened task manager, expanded FL, and killed just ibridge.exe, which disabled all sound but unfroze FL and allowed me to save + restart. In case this helps anyone, although it's probably case-specific.

Part of my frustration with all the focus on big data, statistics, quant, and numbers in general is that these are all forms of inductive reasoning.  Amidst all the hype around being more data driven, many seem to have to forgotten that inductive reasoning only provides an estimate of world.  It does not and cannot prove anything.  Evidence alone does not provide truth.  Data does not equal fact.

There are...[More]

After almost 7 years, there might finally be another entry to this changelog.
https://www.pftq.com/fortwars/hist.php

One step closer to fully automated cities...
http://www.businessinsider.com/r-amazons-automated-grocery-store-of-the-future-opens-monday-2018-1

Just add Blockchain and Virtual Reality:
https://www.pftq.com/blabberbox/?page=The_True_Potential_of_Ripple_and_XRP
https://www.pftq.com/blabberbox/?page=The_City_of_Eden

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#autonomous #fullyautonomous #AI #blockchain #VR #AR #automatedcities #IoT #fullyautomated @Amazon

Dreamt that I've been out traveling too long, and tons of homework piled up in my mailbox due by month's end. Woke and felt like I still had assignments due, that I'm still supposed to be in school, but that I ran away from home.

A nice read- https://gizmodo.com/two-experiments-show-fourth-spatial-dimension-effect-1821739488

Essentially if a 3D object has a 2D shadow, what if we looked for the 3D shadow of a 4D object? My thought is take it further - If our reflections are 2D, what about 3D reflections of a 4D object?

If you think about it, the answer to crossing all spacial dimensions is light.  We always perceive visually in two dimensions even though we live in three.  Just as a flat movie screen serves as the window into our 3D world, it is likely that our 3D world serves as a window to the 4th. This starts to relate also to where Virtual Reality and brain-interface technologies are going; I'd imagine that some combination of the two fields would be necessary for us to perceive more than just in 3D space.

Although somewhat...[More]

Uchiage Hanabi by DAOKO (@Daok0) and Kenshi Yonezu

Heart by Erick Oh (@ossmedia)

Imagine a city where everyone could live in absolute luxury, indulge to their greatest desires, and never have to work or earn a living. It sounds wasteful and unsustainable, but if it actually existed, it might instead save the world.

This is because everyone who actually wants to live in comfort and pleasure would go there.  It would concentrate the bulk of the population in one place while leaving the rest of the world free and preserved.

The best part is that there would be no need to force people to go.  This is most people's idea of heaven on Earth.  This is what most people work all their lives to attain and retire to.  They would *want* to come here.

And for those...[More]

If your only way to improve things is to destroy what was there before, then you're not trying to improve anything but yourself.

Nice article that echoes much my own growing up online in pre-Facebook internet. And Emily is Away is an equally nostalgic game.
http://www.pcgamer.com/rip-aim-remembering-how-we-used-to-talk-on-the-internet/

Social engineering - big words to sound like you were the victim of something ominous when actually you were just tricked by another human being.

I'm not going to hide it.  I want to live forever.  I don't think there's anything wrong with that or that it's "unnatural" or "unethical."  People often act offended on this topic.  "Why are you so greedy? Why so selfish?" But to them, I ask, why is it so bad to want to live? To who do I owe such a huge debt to that I am obligated to die?

One of my personal beliefs is that it is within our lifespans that we will figure out how to prolong our lives indefinitely - aka biological immortality.  Note this is different from actual immortality where you can't die at all; here we are just referring to dying of age.

At the same time, I don't believe there's such thing as a "natural death."  It is not necessary to die, and not all things do, even in nature.  Jellyfish and lobsters are both good examples, where their bodies never really deteriorate no matter how old they get.  Some will get technical and say that lobsters die of getting too large or their shell becoming too much to molt, but that's besides the point, which is that they don't actually lose vitality or youth over time like we do.  Their actual cells do not decay, and they don't become weaker or less able over time (in fact, they continuously get larger and stronger).  That to me is the goal and the definition of biological immortality.

Other arguments...[More]