[Noisebridge-discuss] an interesting potentiometer failure mode (tin whiskers!)

[Taylor Alexander]

It just struck me as silly noise. Should we just copy the daily contents of
Hacker News to this list? A
large<http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/whycassini/cassini20121218.html>
percentage<http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/12/behind-closed-doors-at-the-uns-attempted-takeover-of-the-internet/>
of<http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Its-Clear-Verizon-Is-Blocking-Google-Wallet-AntiCompetitively-122513>
the<http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121220/02365821447/intellectual-ventures-dont-mind-our-2000-shell-companies-thats-totally-normal.shtml>
articles<http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-censorship-backfires-as-new-proxies-bloom-121222/>
posted <http://enpundit.com/a-5-lamp-powered-solely-by-gravity/>
there<http://fernstrategy.com/2012/12/21/the-end-of-x86-an-update/>
daily<https://takingsenseaway.wordpress.com/2012/12/20/letter-from-a-passenger-how-do-tsa-employees-feel-about-working-for-a-despised-agency/>are
highly relevant to readers of the list. But of course it would be
silly
of me to do that. And likewise I thought it was silly for someone to just
post an article here without much explanation as to why (excluding "it's
interesting", because I read 20 articles a day you'd all find interesting,
but I don't post them here).

So in futile hope of discouraging silly conduct, I asked if perhaps there
was more of an explanation (which, by the way, was not rhetorical). Of
course I know that I can't fix people who are "wrong on the internet" by
suggesting they stop being wrong, and that saying nothing may have been
better, but you know how it's best to just ignore bad drivers when they cut
you off? Sometimes you've still gotta give them the finger, even if it's
not going to make a damn difference.


On Dec 21, 2012 8:42 PM, "Danny O'Brien" <danny at spesh.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 3:46 AM, Taylor Alexander <tlalexander at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > There's been lots of interesting articles over the past year. I'd seen
> these
> > before, as I have many articles. Of course not everyone has seen them,
> but
> > the same could be said about many, many things posted on the internet.
> All I
> > asked for was why the OP felt like sharing them. She posted them without
> > making any effort to explain why she thought they were worth putting in
> my
> > inbox. If the articles were new, posting them would make sense - we could
> > assume that the author wanted to call out attention to something urgent.
> But
> > when something has been kicking around the web for a year, the author
> seems
> > to be assuming that we didn't already know about it. I guess my point
> was:
> > "Explain why the F you post something when you post something, don't just
> > link us to old articles without saying why". Not to be combative, but to
> > encourage more thoughtful posts.
> >
>
> Taylor, if  you have a belief model that people are "putting things in
> your inbox", you've already put two more emails in around a thousand
> people's inboxes which are just rhetorical questions that you can't
> really expect the first person to answer. (I don't actually have that
> model, which means I can share #3.)
>
> More widely, you're not going to win that fight here. Basically you
> have two historically successful options here: mailing to say
> something about Noisebridgey things that people may not have heard of,
> or saying *lovely* things about people you love. Everything else turns
> into troll and heartbreak, believe me.
>
> That said, if you want to be rude or have a fight, we can arrange a
> duel for the honor of your inbox at Noisebridge, if you like.
>
> ObFactual:
> Actually, I'm reading this really intriguing book at the moment called
> "Institutional Revolution"
>
> http://www.amazon.com/Institutional-Revolution-Measurement-Emergence-Governments/dp/0226014746
> which has this universal theory about why we went from
> almost-incomprehensible-from-a-modern-perspective institutions like
> aristocracies, duelling, and paid-for naval commissions to more modern
> institutions in a short period of time.
>
> The author, Douglas Allen argues that the old institutions existed
> because of the impossibility of accurately measurement human behaviour
> vs the confounding effects of nature. I.e, you couldn't actually tell
> whether someone was say a good and reliable servant, because for all
> the things that they had control over, there were far more things that
> they had no control over than the modern era, and no measurement
> mechanism for determining the difference. He then goes on to argue
> that a lot of the weirder institutions from our perspective were
> actually economically sensible attempts in response to this.
>
> Duelling was one example -- the aristocracy, he claims, developed
> because of the challenges of establishing trustworthy and non-cheating
> individuals when the Monarch/State was depending on them to conduct
> actions on its behalf. The solution was to evolve a social institution
> where "aristocrats" had to sink an incredible amount of hostage
> capital --- investment that was no good for anything but being
> recognised as a 'good aristocrat' -- so that if they did cheat, they
> lost a huge investment that could not be recouped anywhere else.
> Duelling was one of the ways of guarding entry to this group: by
> requiring 'good aristocrats' to always respond to a duel, aristocrats
> were required to demonstrably be willing to risk their life in
> pursuance of aristocratic values, which meant they were committing
> even more to depending on their good name within a narrow social
> enclave.
>
> I'm reading this because I was interested in the challenges of
> environments where people choose not to measure or survey individual
> behaviour, and alternative models to discourage cheating or
> free-riding. Which is why I think that Noisebridgians should now have
> a policy of challenging people to duels for the slightest perceived
> infraction.
>
>
> >
> > On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 3:28 AM, Robert "Finny" Merrill
> > <rfmerrill at berkeley.edu> wrote:
> >>
> >> I found them interesting.
> >
> >
> >
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> >
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