I'd rather not be rich or famous. If I happened to become either I'd try and leverage them in some way to help or form organisations that can navigate the hot mess of our societies next few decades.
For me trying to negotiate with people playing super hardball (ignoring social norms etc) makes me think they will not honour any agreements made. Because those rely on social norms too. Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal etc.
Well, that will depend on your interpretation of their actions, your local or industry-specific norms, and the actual circumstances of the negotiation.
I have met tough negotiators who uphold their end of the deal just fine.
The people who let me down the most are those who do not even attempt to negotiate on my prices: usually they'll think about it way later, but still won't accept discounts, until they run out of budget. Then you're thinking to yourself “why did they undermine this whole thing by paying me more than they could afford, for something I was willing to negotiate on?”. Then they miss 20k in billing, and you break it off.
Which is why you'd want to contractualize agreements. Sounds like you're, naturally, wary of entering into a gentleman's agreement with someone you don't feel is a gentleman.
Contracts are largely unenforceable in any real-world way. If the counterparty uses dirty tricks in the negotiation process, expect dirty tricks in the following of the contract is my experience.
The contract could be perfectly formed, and still unenforceable.
At the end of the day, it's a piece of paper. Enforcing it in a civil court will take years, if not decades and costs tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees. Most people don't have the time or the money to do this, so it ends up "settling", often times with arbitrary fairness.
Settlement is more a game of "who can do what to whom".
> The world is a giant ship with 8+ billion each with their own oar in the water. A vessel like that turns very slowly and with a danger on the horizon as complex and difficult to understand as climate change, we should not expect everyone to wake up overnight and be all-in on fixing the problem. But almost every trend shows that people are waking up, changing their habits, and shifting their priorities in the right direction.
We still subsidies fossil fuel extraction! When we stop doing that I'll think the ship is really turning. Other than that I think the bubble of people who care about this in increasing, but not having a huge impact on the direction we are actually moving.
I've been thinking about how best to get people the information they need to deal with the climate crisis.
I'm thinking about a community run portal to try and match person to the correct advice. E.g. someone with investments should find advice about how to invest to help. People interested in acting locally should find environmental groups to join. Activist people .
Google is fine if you know what you are looking for, but I have come across a few different times where I didn't know the correct terminology. E.g. I wanted to find something like a community energy group in my local area, but I didn't know what it was called.
I'm not currently sure how to do this. Some form of search engine where people put in information about themselves is a possibility. Or an advanced directory.
I wonder if you can monitor energy usage (with an external chip) and compare it to what is expected to catch major changes.
So for the FPGA you could load it with a risc-v arch and then run that arch through some performance load. If the energy usage has changed a lot it may well be doing something nefarious. Bonus points if you can have a (set of) reference fpga's in the cloud you can compare arbitrary work loads on so that it is harder to predict and be stealthy about nefarious activities.
Use side-channel sources of information, where possible, to drive down the scale of changes possible.
I think that at some point in the future 'zero trust' will extend all the way down to the hardware level with individual components exchanging keys or otherwise nothing will happen. There simply won't be a safe perimeter within which you can trust another piece of hardware. And that's probably as it should be because a modern computer is better thought of as a network of - hopefully - collaborating processors than a single CPU with some RAM and peripherals.
This design does actually have a second external FPGA chip, which is in the "Untrusted" domain. It's running an ICE40UP5K, and acts more as the power management IC that turns the secure domain on and off.
> We’re now in a post-individual human world. We’re now in a world that is controlled by these emergent goals of the corporations. I don’t think there’s any turning back the clock on that. We are now in that world.
One of the things that worries me about this is that there are some things that corporations and governments aren't good at yet.
Lets call the root of the problem, adopting a new world view. Why is this important? Adopting new world views is very important for scientific advancement and for adapting to problems (climate change denial can be seen as a failure to adopt a world view).
If we accept organisations are the future, we need to create new organisational types that can adopt new world views more quickly, so that we can have more reactive and innovative organisations. New organisations tend to require new legislation, as what is a legal organisations is defined in law.
However our current organisations can chose to stop this legislation. So we might be left in a position where individuals are squeezed out of having any influence but not so much innovation is coming from the organisations either. It might be worth looking to see if this view is historically consistent with things like the stagnation in China.
I have also wondered about the inevitability of the dominance of a tiny number of increasingly powerful corporations. I used to joke about William Gibson’s cyber punk novels being future history, but now perhaps it is nothing to joke about.
Since (mostly) retiring I have been volunteering at my local food bank which is both a positive example of local self organization and serves as an introduction to many other small specialized groups that make sure kids get new school clothes, and other specific community needs.
By nature I am a happy and optimistic person and I think that the future might still turn out just fine, but with better AI and other tech, different social structures, etc. I bet that changes in society will accelerate. Nothing is the same except for change, but I argue the that second derivative of change is going to exponentially skyrocket.
> I bet that changes in society will accelerate. Nothing is the same except for change, but I argue the that second derivative of change is going to exponentially skyrocket.
Whenever people talk about change, I look at my flush toilet which uses the same technology which was invented in 1592. Feeding into a sewage system built in 1866. With waste water treatment standards from 1912. This helps ground me in expectations about how quickly things change.
There are countervailing forces to change as well. Society has had the internet for 20-30 years which has changed the means with which society forms opinions (for the better and worse), but it has had little impact on the actual method of government and laws. Nor has it changed how these things change much. Why not? Should we expect more changes in these things or not? This is all a bit unknowable.
We now exist in two-three ( western/china and possibly russia) spheres of influence in the on-line world. Lack of small disconnected regions has been hypothesised as a cause of china's stagnation. Will it be the same for us?
Another countervailing tendency is energy (or lack of it). Change requires energy and energy is problematic right now. We cannot agree how it should be produced (carbon is out, but nuclear and renewables are at loggerheads a bit) and it seems like it we have some negative feedback loops in progress already (increased numbers of droughts due to climate change will decrease the amount of food energy we can capture as a whole).
> So herding rabid cats seems to be the core skill.
Cat herding only makes sense if you have an idea of what should be done. Herding for the sake of keeping everyone 'on the same page' can be harmful. If you are trying to get a consensus this will squash small ideas before they have had a chance to prove themselves. Sometimes space and non-management is needed for things to sprout.
> And regardless of morals, it's an inherently insecure paradigm.
As well as this I think it slows communication of important issues and undermines trust. We need to be better at these things globally so that we can tackle the important global problems we are facing with climate breakdown etc.
