Let's talk open source solutions. Privacy, trust, data, computation, AI, platform, distribution, decentralization, rights etc

I think the confusion is that I’m thinking simulation platform as wide range of tools not only computational simulation. May be the word simulation is messing it up. kinda like trial runs with tens of thousands of participants and idea tester, intuition builder, Data science tools, optimization solutions for all sorts of things production, sales or it could be as simple as surveys. And it could also mean, a democratized platform where participants can design and build and train models and host on platform.

Of course achieving high level of accuracy is difficult with single type of simulation, multiple simulations and test and power of deduction can produce high accuracy. It’s difficult for me to convert my exact thoughts here but I’ll make some drawings etc this weekend which should explain much better…

I think I’m creating some confusion as well. My project is extremely high level. It’s essentially theoretical principles for the stewardship of a planet. It’s scientific socioeconomics. There is likely many many ways to do it. I don’t want to create a specific socioeconomic system. I just want to sort out what kind of approaches work and do not.

The theory is based on current scientific theory; that is correlated with cross disciplinary, inferential, statistical analysis. I’m not trying to create a social system. I’m interested in the scientific possibilities of doing so. I share some examples; but I couldn’t possibly imagine all of the possibilities.

It seems like there may be a number of biases in my model that I should attend to. I want it to be clear; and it doesn’t seem as though it is.

Hey @wendell,
We have a thread here regarding your discussion on [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m27utT3D2_E](LIVE: PC Giveaway, TechDeals, News and Ryzen Redux)…

and If you end up reading this then can you write some of your opinion here?

You can not have a “right” to someone else’s time, liberty or property. I’m not trying to be rude, but this is a childish notion that becomes violent and dangerous when adults don’t mature past this idea of feeling entitled to things because others have them or they want them.

Aside from the ethical problem of taking from others by force, you have the more practical reality that to do so involves a government. That government will inevitably be corrupt to some degree or the other and end up serving the “connected few” and defeating your goal of “democratization”.

Access to technology comes from driving down cost. Driving down cost comes from innovation. Innovation comes from experimentation, risk, venture and failure of ideas that didn’t work (from which the all important knowledge comes more so than it does from success).

Socialism/communism is/are a lie to convince you to give up your choice and self determination, but what so many seem to miss is that this surrender now makes you subject to the whims of “leaders” who will operate on their self interest not yours. If you read Marx closely, you should see a scheme designed at best to “force evolution” of man, but how do we force a species to evolve? We control its breeding or we cull the undesireable traits. It is a genocideal ideology at its core. At its best it assumes that those driving this forced evolution are impossibly ethical and intelligent, neither of which is ever true of political leaders.

Want cheap, ubiquitous computing? Build it and they will come. Risk your time and capital, convince others to voluntarily risk theirs. Make invidual greed and self interest for wealth and computing resources work for the greater good. That’s the magic sauce of capitalism - it does not demand that we be better, it allows us to be ourselves as inviduals yet still drive society forward. No surprise then that free markets have been the driver of most of man’s huge leaps forward. Where it fails, far more often than not, there is a government favoring, backing or protecting a player and insulating them from the costs of their bad decisions while allowing them to profit from their successes. Cost/risk/profit must apply the same party or you end up with perversions of supply and demand. A free market offers no insulation from bad decisions and thus teaches participants to behave better.

Aside from the genocide and oppression, as if that weren’t bad enough, when free markets are replaced with government driven organs, at best trying earnestly to implement this promise, they centralize decision making. All eggs in one basket. No diversity of approach, perspective. Engineering cannot move forward with only one approach, perspective or driver of experimentation as failure of an experiment is just as if not more important than success…

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You got it completely wrong… right to have computation that will create need for innovation, more people will see the value in creating and improving the technology than only few corporations. When i said we have right to computation, it means similar to having right to air we breath. do not imply things to add statement like violence etc…

I never spoke about socialism/communism, it’s a stupid old topic we all understood decades back… i mean why would you take it there… i’m not even gonna rely to that…

Wow… ignorance is so bright… guess what power structure evolves. people working in corporation or in a a group are still same people… i think you made your mind before even reading whole thing… it’s not about socialism, capitalism and all that… if anything, it’s empowering concept of free market.

You are the problem of internet… it’s not a government thing… it’s a micro-capitalistic framework which empowers individuals and small business to rise against force of Corporatism and government corruption. The whole idea was to have an alternative force as competition which basically means free market capitalism. you gotta read it again. Decentralized means economic and geographic freedom in a instead of monopolizing in the name of capitalism. Grow up bro… chill… At Least don’t show your rage when talking against it…

I’m plenty chill don’t worry.

You say it’s not about government, but declare a right to access to computes? Who do expect will be enforcing this right?

I said computation not computers. and for rights part it could be decided by people themselves, read 2nd thread on top. When we understand that computation is our cognition in the future then we make computers to access computational power. It becomes a problem if we do not have our own infrastructure to compute. Think of Uber. we buy cars and run in Uber service and both make money… Now if only uber owned everything then that would be like what google and amazon are today.
So along with of amazon aws, or google compute engine and MS azure, we get a public platform as option. it will also keep the cost down for these big corporations. Also don’t forget we would have our own AI that will work on our behalf… I have no doubt that we all need huge computation individually as well.

Well, let’s get into the meat of this and why I, as matter of fact - not out of rage, categorized much of your approach as socialism (more precisely giving the state control over the means of production, even if some private ownership remains)

A “public option” does not augment markets. It disrupts them by adding a player to the market not driven by the same supply and demand rules as the other players. If the “public” option can lose money (be cash-flow negative) permanently, how are decisions made about:

  • how is this infrastructure built/structured in the first place?
  • what enhancement are to be made?
  • what amounts to “fair use” of this public resource by one or a group of individuals?
  • what happens when the resource is used in ways that conflict with the political goals of the “leadership?” (i.e. censorship and restriction of access based on political clout or social unpopularity).

As a competitor to a government entity, I am faced with a competitor who can drive me out of business even if my service provision and solution is superior, because I must deliver a profit, pay my people, etc… This is something that seems to be missed time and again with government involvement with markets as a “provider” rather than enforcer of ethics.

There’s that violence again… what if Wendell forgoes other frivolities, works a double shift and saves his bitcoin and wants to buy/build another compute-block because he’d like to experiment or maybe offer a compute-block farm for a reasonable price providing his IT expertise to keep that farm running tip-top while you worry only about your computes.

You say he “can own just 1”… so he’s broken the law? His property seized? He’s arrested? He’s exposed to usurious taxation and penalty that put him in debt? Why are you so angry with Wendell and his personal compute farm? :wink: (sarcasm on that last bit, I know you don’t wish him ill, but your policies are oppressing him).

You are glossing over vast swaths of infrastructure, protocols, mechanisms, interfaces, etc… all of these details involve decisions to be made and experimentation to find the “right” ones and then those “right” ones might change with time. The single “public” utility model will freeze one set of decisions. It will artificially price out other competing models.

I want the same decentralization you seek in principle. I want to have petaflops and exabytes in my basement (which is why I have a server rack). Whether those computes are silicon or protein based… I want “more power Scotty” to solve problems and understand the world around me.

The difference is that I don’t presuppose that I have the best answer for all time as to how to provide that. So, I’m willing to let my ideas compete and prove themselves. I don’t ask that taxation, imprisonment, influence peddling and military might be used to enforce my opinion on how things are done.

I’m quite sure you don’t think you are taking away anyone’s choice, but I’m trying to show you that your proposal requires it. Your proposal works against a diversity of approach and problem-solving and cooperative experimentation and ultimately against its own aims.

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First, it’s not socialist thing. I’m a capitalist. When i try to see future of capitalism, I get a feeling that if opportunity and access to AI and computation is not distributed fairly then it would be very dark… AI and computation is like education in my mind…

Internet and Open source are public options. wikipedia is also kinda public option and thousands others.
Open source and Github is an alternative to privately owned closed platform. you’re still getting it wrong… I’m just ideating in the context that we do not have to rely on others infrastructure for our personal data and cognition and to protect our individuality. Google, Facebook amazon etc are all curated service on a public platform Internet, they will evolve and still continue to do good work even on UBI network.

If i had all the solutions then i would be meeting an investor than writing here… but obvious guess is Decentralized platform… Did you read everything above… it’s all explained already… I’m ideating what i think to understand some options…

Dynamic of the computation requirement will change when somany people are involved in a serving infrastructure. Thousands of inventions would take place within framework. For example sake, some kind of quantum algorithm for temporal and spacial storage within network like neural web among all connected computeblocks. specific protocol standards for security.

Few simple algorithms could manage use of resources based on how much they provide to compute pool. I mean all those things can be figure out… don’t think computeblock as computers, they are engines to carry out tasks. people still have good old computers and internet…

they both can co-exist. Unlike governments, it’s not to be limited geographically. By your logic there would not be any company. Everything could be a competitor to government. as long as system complies with respective govs local laws then it should be no different from any other.

I was merely thinking a reasonable solution for fairness of system. i’ll try make a scenario which will explain much better,

so let’s say that it’s called UBI network… Think of UBI network as independent international technology body that manages this compute network. Like WHO or CRY…

Users can become member of UBI network by buying a computeBlock or building themselves using UBI’s specification and keep it at their place. users can also buy/rent their compute block on the compute farms maintained by third parties.

Each user can have only 1 ComputeBlock but they can choose to bump up the configuration as they need. Single CB per person for the reason of linked identity. You can not have 2 passports. However no one is stopping anyone from owning multiple compute blocks as long as they can borrow someone else’s identity which then that block will share generated profits with… So it could be a rich person setting up 500 computeblocks to sponsor entire village in part of rural India and still make half profits.

Again, you keep forgetting that it’s just an open discussion. It starts with ideations. Just because I’m proposing it doesn’t mean that it’s mine… Open for anyone… to discuss modify with better solutions if you think.

anyway, we already have most infrastructure, uses same Internet. ComputeBlocks are essentially computers. I explained basic mechanism above as I understand. some linux distro as OS. Web services and openstack like interface accessed remotely.

Like i said, give it a name to group of individuals or status of a company, doesn’t change the fact that it’s still same group of people working together. Notion that company is different from group of people is quite uninformed. If I’m paid for my services then whether I work in a company or independently shouldnt matter… Again same example is open source… Imagine Makershub or PeopleHub as asset on UBI network, which works like Github but physical jobs… Gig economy like there are all sorts of professionals in peopleHub, ideators, designers, engineers, planners, builders etc. Put a price on the job and people will apply. A bunch of people with their expertise can come together for a single project or job. whatever man it’s one example i came up on the fly and don’t catch me on everything i say…

Again, if you actually try understanding it then you will not find anything different from how everything works rightnow… I’m not proposing a different social structure. that’s you problem. It’s exactly same as any world organization which transcends countries and governments such as World Health Organization. The only difference would be that UBI network would function on much more democratic framework than an organization…

`What is the difference between Compute Network and Internet? Like internet it’s also open public platform… How is it taking people’s choice? it’s actually creating choice, not only for individuals but also for all sorts of small to big companies like Google and Amazon…

I think It solves hard problems such privacy, computation, storage, empowerment, UBI and wealth distribution. Not to forget that it will create millions of opportunities for people. Implementation like this is a must for out future like internet was. It’s not my style to speak against corporations, I think it was their time same as AOL has their time before internet was open. Why is it that only tech corporations have to provide computation? Most people buy their own hardware for personal computation… Why all of a sudden connecting these computers together to perform computation became a anti-capitalistic, violent and what all things you stated earlier… I don’t get your thought process.`

Also the whole idea was sprung out of my personal need for high computation. I can train machine learning models or test optimization algorithms or do simulation or render some few minutes VR content. Everyone in network gets to use super computer but within their quota. I don’t know about you but I’ll be pretty psyched to have access to super computer… I’m not holding on it… if you think there is some serious fundamental problem then let me know… I’m willing to accept if you can explain me clearly…

So, you’ve made statements about hard limits to what an individual can and can’t do, you don’t intend for those to be limits imposed by law, but system design? Same goes with “public option” - this is a phrase generally used to describe a government service provision.

If that wasn’t your intention, then I read too far into your assertions and I apologize.

Whatever you do, you will need an incentive in the system to compensate people for provision of their computes - so again, no “right” to them, but perhaps more ready access could be provided (though frankly, the compute rates of Amazon and similar are low and getting lower).

If that’s your aim, etherium and number of other block-chain’s are already designed to provide distributed compute in a manner similar to what you describe, but without the hard limit. The intention of these is to make computes a “micro-transaction” commodity. Instead of mining ether, so the theory goes, you could potentially submit compute requests.

I think the hard limit on nodes per user is ultimately counter-productive as it limits “liquidity”. It’s in your best interest to keep “liquidity” in the market for the same reason it works in the stock/option/futures markets with “market makers”. That system is not without its problems, but one aspect it demonstrates is that having a critical mass in the market always “ready to trade” is critical to avoid huge spikes in availability.

I’m actually much more concerned about stopping the clamp-down on block-chain and prohibition of tools one can use to maintain their privacy than what the tech can do. It appears there there is a very healthy field of experimentation along the lines you describe, but there is a similar push to make privacy and anonymity impossible from the government front.

I know the conversation has picked up a bit, but if you want a thread removed, you can ping any moderator or leader and we would be happy to do so.

For the record, I would delist the thread rather than delete it, unless there’s a good reason to delete it. You can’t undelete, but you can re-list.


I don’t have anything useful to bring to the discussion, sorry about that. I just thought I’d chime in from the leadership perspective on this.

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Even in this day and age people generally don’t understand economics. This is because it has been replaced with politics and finance. This is what we are taught in school; for the purpose of preparing us for jobs.

Our politics and finance was created with the first instances of large states; back in the neolithic. It’s a consequence of the first form of governance called Coercion. This is centralized control of resources, including necessities. The agreement is that one works for shares of the resources. There has, and likely will always be unfair distribution is such a system; because it creates the perception of scarcity. This has an unfavorable effect on human cognition; that results in a compulsion to hoard. This model doesn’t work. The evidence is clear. We have several thousand years of real world testing to demonstrate it. The outcome has always been cyclic failure; throughout recorded history with the only exceptions being the states that have been taken over through war.

Any act of central control of resources that coerces the individuals to perform some expected behavior for their share is Coercion; plain and simple. That is the society that we live under today.

Finance and politics break each other. Finance is Coercion; and politics follows it’s lead. That too is the society that we live in today.

Keeping necessities from people is not only unethical, but it also has been shown empirically not to work. The notion that people need “incentives” is ancient, Coercion dogma that is demonstrably false. Humans are predisposed to cooperate socially and contribute to the greater good. This is behavioral science 101; and it’s observed in all biology. This even includes microbes.

No matter what form of governance we wish upon our coercive society, it’s going to be Coercion; because the economic model is coercive. That is a fact that we all need to come to terms with. The notion of “free markets” is a pipe dream under a coercive monetary system. The coercive aspects of finance will poison the markets; as they have in the entirety of written, human history. That is what should be expected. The notion of a need for liquidity is just intellectual laziness of sorts.

We are also predisposed to acquire resources with as little output as possible. This is a natural economic emergence; that is observed in all biology. The problem with this is, it can result in oversimplification. This is what has happened; and the result has been disorder in the system, that accrues over time, resulting in increased effort to mitigate the issues. It seems simpler on the surface but it causes so many problems that general solution is defied; and collapse of the state is inevitable. This is the fate of every large state in human history… barring the ones that were taken over by war… only to have the same thing happen under the new leadership.

Finance eventually kills large states… not government of any kind… rather currency based economics. That is an empirical fact.

The most viable way to solve the issues with “rights” is make sure that needs are taken care of. This is not “Socialism” because Socialism is another form of Coercion… just like Capitalism and Democracy. Concentrating on solutions for meeting needs that correlate with human predisposition to specific behaviors is a model that is probably more likely to function as desired. We keep failing because we keep building “better” societies on a faulty foundation.

Finance is garbage. If we wish our ideals to bare fruit, we need to get the Coercion out of the way. Our markets will not be liberated if we are not. We need to realize that.

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Thank you. you explained it much better… People often think or present very black and white view on such hard topics and blame of being socialist even just because it sounded like socialism in their head.

That’s why we need some sort simulation to produce unbiased results. I believe it’s too complicated to be resolved with just one ideology. Most suitable solution might be some hybrid with some rights along with upper and lower limit with lot of tweaks along the way. who knows?

Ok sorry… i get it… My understanding with public option meant open source for public… Nothing to do with Governments… and no laws but system design…

I was not simply adding a hard limit but defining a network policy, I thought of this as a push-pull mechanism to sustain network infrastructure and incentivise people for giving back to network. It’s a free world and there will be alternatives.

My idea was to avoid same mistake again that will alleviate imbalances to some degree. I think it’s a valid argument towards increasing total computation of the network first. The way I understand, longevity of an infrastructure depends on fairness of its distribution. It might be more important thing for free market capitalization as long as rules are same for all, but that’s just my speculation and I’m not sure of anything that is why we are having an open discussion here.

Alternatively the network policy itself could be democratized as multiple options within the ubi network and users could just choose whoevers policy you like the most among the options however it might increase the inefficiencies in the network due to differed access between multiple policies.

#Trust #Tex

I want to move beyond computation to few other important topics. Just to keep it more organized so a new person can easily follow the topics in threads, I’ll add #topicname name on the top of thread like this one.

Trust. It is a super complex topic… and before we can just start expressing our views.
I had a thought experiment in mind, here you go…

A. Most people rely on credibility of the source to assume credibility of the information.
B. But the information itself could be either factually true, partially true or false.
C. If information is valid and verifiable then its source has no importance.

First thing of this thought experiment is that you have to trust that point A and B are valid and If not then you can express why it is invalid?

Then give your judgement on point C.

Does that make sense?

I agree entirely. The type of simulation that you are referencing seems a lot like pre-applied, scientific testing. I’m all for it.

Theory is not only the product of rigorous testing, it’s also subject to rigorous testing. Testing corrects theory as much as it results in theory.

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As an engineer/scientist, it’s been painful to learn that even “facts” can be subjective on the timeline of a human life or even generations.

Ultimately, physics wins but for periods of decades or even centuries dogma, bad statistics and politics can have the scientific establishment accepting a “fact” that is not true. Entire fields of study are based on such assertions that are either completely bogus (think flat earth and geocentric universe yielding astrology and spiral paths of stars/planets as the “science” of Galileo’s day) or just pure correlation without causality.

Today we have similar though perhaps more subtle issues of facts based on bogus statistics (ignoring standard deviation, cohort relationships, over smoothing, and generally conflating correlation with causation).

All of which to say one should not underestimate how difficult and different “facts” and “truth” can be owing to limits of human understanding.

Blockquote

The existence of “coercion” of one form does not justify alternate forms. Coercion by the state and and markets are very different.

Your assertion is akin to saying the carrot and stick are of equal evil for their influence.

Market “influence” offers the ability to resist and counter with alternate products and services as well as boycott. Resisting the state’s coercion involves violence.

Engineers and scientists like efficiency, so they often try to make or propose government centralization as a means of providing such effiency without a full acceptance of the consequences and idiosyncrasies of government involvement… “good” government is not efficient as efficiency bypasses redundancy and hurdles put into place to avoid abuse of power.

I said it was “Coercion plain and simple”. Adding your own spin after the fact is a straw man argument. I didn’t judge it. I merely described it.

I did however judge the holding back of necessities as unethical. Feel free to disagree.

There is a lot here, but there is a lot of “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” unfortunately.

I learned so much about this from studying telecom companies and how they came up/came about. In America, we seem to have in some cases kept large companies on very, very short leashes. In odd ways sometimes, sure, but interesting.

AT&T profit margins were capped. I think recently we capped (then repealed?) the max profit margin a company is allowed to make on selling health insurance. These kind of approaches have their downsides too, but they worked pretty well for their era.

This was in an era that probably had less regulation than we have now, so “smaller government” then probably. Or, I suppose I would concede that the regulation was simpler, but broader rather than lots of separate more narrow-scope regulation.

Socialism isn’t the answer. There is a book, I forget as it has been ages since I read it but I’d like to re-read it now that I’m a bit older. I may be able to get more out of it. But it was a fascinating look inside USSR/Russia during Lenin, Stalin, etc and how in the beginning it really was a meritocracy and it worked well. The people were still smarting from the previous government’s shortcomings and everything was about improving everything for everyone, providing for all, etc. Then once that generation was comfortable there wasn’t really top-down systematic corruption that was introduce but you wanted the best thing you could for your children. But often your children did not have the same aptitude or desires for the same things as their parents. And that might lead to unequal this or that. And the book sort of described situations arising where one occupation was more preferred than another and it became complicated because people were interested in their own self interest… a couple more generations of that, corruption entered rapidly, and the rest is history. It sure was interesting, and still a lesson for today perhaps.

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I think we showed this again with NASA…

The first generation built off the self-determined, free market mentality and “DNA” of that generation and did something truly amazing… by the very next decade, it was already operating like a bureaucracy and stagnated badly for many decades to follow. Clinging bitterly to a shuttle program its designers knew was dead end. It was the only game in town though having priced and legislated out competition entirely.

Ironic that it is often held up as the proof of government doing something free markets wouldn’t when it is also proof that government inevitably slaughters the golden egg laying goose. The exception that proves the rule…

Locteniel has said that I misinterpreted “public” to mean government provided rather than “the commons”, though I must admit I remain confused by the free mixing of what looks like governmental policy and system design.

My questions about “how decisions are to be made?” Were not critiqueing the specific algo described to make those decisions, but the inevitable pitfalls of a central, single decision maker who lacks supply and demand pressure to keep them in check. Good decisions are found by iteration - subtraction of what did not work to leave that which did not virtuoso genius of cults of personality as the media would seem to want us to believe.

The ability of markets to try, fail nd try again is the least worst way to find the right answer, but it’s still terrible. The grand lie is that it can be less than terrible…

p.s. I either used or used then deleted the same phrase “path to hell… good intentions.” My first thought as well.