It was my feeling with robotics that the more challenging aspect will be making them economically viable rather than simply the challenge of the task itself.

We all know that gambling addicts exist and how destructive it is to their lives, the casino exploits behaviors and gets all their money. As a result people know casinos are dangerous, reasonable people avoid them, are warned about them, and the government forces regulation to reduce their ability to exploit vulnerable people.

Imagine if none of these controls existed and nobody talked about or generally knew that casinos were dangerous. Imagine if the casinos were 100x better at exploiting you and you were forced to walk through a casino every time you leave your house. You’d get a lot more people having their lives destroyed.

So what this video tries to do is important, naming the term, “algorithmic complacency”, allows it to be recognized, discussed, and actively kept in check by users. Ideally regulated by the government as well, just like casinos.

The casino also provides a service, entertainment, there’s nothing wrong with a reasonable person attending, spending some money and being entertained. But we as a society recognize that a company exploiting behaviors to get all of a person’s money, is bad, and try to limit that negative outcome even though we still allow casinos to exist.

Time, attention, and focus is so abstract people don’t even realize they’re spending it, or how modified their behavior has become because of the algorithm’s exploitation. As a result we let companies who are 100x better at manipulation than casinos operate without so much as mentioning they’re doing it, and steal increasing amounts of a user’s time.

Music or sports are more interesting to investigate (in my opinion) since those specific actions won’t be preprogrammed and must be learned independently.

The same way we build abstractions for language in order to perform “telepathy” it seems like for music or sports we build body-specific abstractions. They work similar to words within our own brain but are not something easily communicated since they’re not tied to any language, it’s just a feeling.

I think it’s an interesting point that quite often the best athletes or musicians are terrible coaches. They probably have a much more innate internal language for their body that cannot be communicated easily. Partially, I think, that their body is more different than others which helps them be exceptional. Or that weaker athletes or musicians need to focus much more on lessons from others, so their body language gets tied much closer to human language and that makes it much easier for them to then communicate the lessons they learn to others.

> Efficiency: Taking a lock saves you from unnecessarily doing the same work twice (e.g. some expensive computation). If the lock fails and two nodes end up doing the same piece of work, the result is a minor increase in cost (you end up paying 5 cents more to AWS than you otherwise would have) or a minor inconvenience (e.g. a user ends up getting the same email notification twice).

I think multiple nodes doing the same work is actually much worse than what’s listed, as it would inhibit you from having any kind of scalable distributed processing.

Or simply wrap the return with Optional.ofNullable, checkstyle will not accept it if you don’t.

I can’t remember the last time I encountered one by using the proper compile time checks. It does need to be enforced organization-wide, and not partially with annotations, but if you can make that change then you can code in Java without the mental overhead of null.