Yonatan Zunger

The “Paxos” of Lamport’s paper has no relationship to the real island of Paxi. Lamport’s intro to the paper explains its origin, and footnote 1 of the paper itself emphasizes that. :)

Ah, the joys of Medium’s reply system; LD and LI are short for “location-dependent” and “location-independent,” and were defined and discussed in the original article that started this thread.

I’m also very interested in AI’s for emotional labor. It naively seems like a very hard problem, because the objectives aren’t even…

This is a great piece! Thank you for writing it; I’m glad people are thinking about the UX of gender selection.

I’ve got one bit to add from a horribly hard version of this I ran into at work a few years ago, for any UX designers who have to build products that work in multiple languages. (I was the person ultimately in…

The question of the bounds of automation is a really good one. I think there are two kinds of things that make a job hard to automate: things involving the brain, and things involving the body.

For things involving the brain, there are three major categories of task: tasks with a clear goal and a predictable environment (e.g…

Sales calls of the sort you’re describing tend to happen only for small storefront businesses. When sales are happening to large companies, or even medium ones, it starts with telephone calls, e-mails, 1:1 meetings and conversations, ultimately larger presentation meetings, more 1:1’s, phone calls, and so on. All things which work just fine remotely — and frequently do.

Someone else can quite firmly believe that their ideas are right, but that puts you under no obligation to believe the same thing yourself; and the fact that they believe that their ideas are right is useful information in many circumstances, but it doesn’t actually make them right.

If not estimating consequences, what framework should you use?

Estimates will always contain uncertainty, and considering the consequences if you’re wrong is part of considering the consequences as a whole. There’s no way around that, especially in matters of life and death.

You sure don’t pick simple questions to ask, do you. :)

This problem is profoundly difficult, because while I have had many thoughts on it over the years, it’s a hard one for me to write about — too much personal weight, and too much political bullshit associated with doing so — and all the excellent ideas I can think of are…

Ah, so you haven’t seen the recently released court documents. Wilson admitted under oath that his entire story was a lie, that Brown never attacked him or tried to wrest away his gun, and that Brown was never armed with anything more than his own hands.

which other ethnic group has been responsible for mass murder across the globe in our time?

White people?