Get the most recent info and news about Alcoa on HackerNoon, where 10k+ technologists publish stories for 4M+ monthly readers.

Alcoa Corporation, together with its subsidiaries, produces and sells bauxite, alumina, and aluminum products in the United States, Spain, Australia, Brazil, Canada, and internationally. The company operates through three segments: Bauxite, Alumina, and Aluminum. It engages in bauxite mining operations; and processes bauxite into alumina and sells bauxite to customers who process it into industrial chemical products. The company is also involved in the aluminum smelting, casting, and rolling businesses; and the production of aluminum sheets primarily sold directly to customers in the packaging market for the production of aluminum cans. In addition, it owns hydro and coal generation assets that produce and sell electricity to the wholesale market to traders, large industrial consumers, distribution companies, and other generation companies. The company was formerly known as Alcoa Upstream Corporation and changed its name to Alcoa Corporation in October 2016. The company was founded in 1888 and is headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Alcoa

alcoa

Deputy opposition leader Sussan Ley will meet Alcoa as part of a three-day visit to Perth, during which she will accuse Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of using WA for ‘photo ops’.

Liberal frontbenchers including Sussan Ley to meet Alcoa amid row over Kwinana refinery closure | The West Australian

The International Subversives.

Hardly a day goes by where you don’t bump into headlines about Bitcoin (ETH/LTC/choose your fighter) and the evolving technologies fueling the fad. Blockchain technology, in particular, has made front pages for stirring ploys. But what we haven’t seen before are dApps, forging a brighter future for traditional mobile apps and crypto usage. And while we were squabbling over cryptos, decentralized applications amounted to almost 4K, accounting for . That’s quite a statement for something as fledgling as dApps, isn’t it? 179.37 daily users So let’s not get cryptic (pun intended) about this new app generation and find out whether they’re worth the hype. We’ll also discuss their plausible prospects in the years to come. But first, a dab of dApps You must remember the wealth of opportunities that were offered to startups and investors by . ICO in 2017 Back then, decentralized apps were heralded as a brand new tech comfort aimed at a slew of industries. Sadly, only a few industries accrued dApp benefits back then. After the bust of the great cryptocurrency bubble in early 2018, we haven’t heard much about dApps until 2020. That’s when dApps renewed their potential on the Ethereum mainnet. A-list players like MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, and Tesla’s Elon Musk have attested to the rebounded prospects of dApps. So what is a dApp? Decentralized apps (dApps) are software programs that exist and run on a P2P network of computers rather than being hosted on an individual computer or server. In theory, they represent the next stage in the evolution of software development, which has traditionally been dominated by centralized servers. In general terms, dApps are decentralized, transparent, and more attack-resistant applications that rely on blockchain. The technology itself is an open-access database, where all data nodes are cryptographically linked to each other and have an immutable block structure. According to , here’s what dApps bring to the table: Ethereum – no denial-of-service attacks are possible once the smart contract is deployed and on the blockchain. Zero downtime – no user data is shared with third parties. Privacy – user adoption of dApps or their deployment cannot be denied by any single entity (there are none, actually). Censorship-resistant – the stored data is immutable, it cannot be forged or erased, which allows the technology to satisfy the main data integrity requirements, according to the FDA's ALCOA concept. Complete data integrity – thanks to the automatic execution of smart contracts there is no need to trust a central authority to verify the transaction. Trustless computation/verifiable behavior But along with the added edge, decentralized applications are tricky to maintain, update, scale. A back-of-the-envelope calculation puts the overhead at something like 1,000,000x that of standard computation currently. - Ethereum Clearly, centralized applications beat dApps in these areas. As a developer and owner, you have complete control over the app and how it is used. Traditional applications can also handle large amounts of traffic. Already, we can assume that . So, why should you invest in decentralized solutions? Let’s see. dApps aren’t the ultimate resort for all software kinds What are dApps used for? Decentralized applications aren’t the hype only. Today, we can see lots of practical implementations of dApps. These include: - applications that allow you to buy, sell, and trade digital assets (e.g. MetaMask swap, etc). DeFi (NFT market) - these combine the functions of an online store, an auction, and a blockchain platform for the issuance of non-interchangeable tokens. Users should be able to create their own NFT items and sell them. Digital collectibles - blockchain-based gaming applications where users can buy, sell or trade virtual properties (e.g. CryptoKitties) Gaming/Gambling - social media dApps that encourage users to share valuable content by compensating them with crypto. Communication - a promising use case of dApps that will help link hospital data systems across a shared network and make patient data more secure. Healthcare Just think of it. A few years ago, dApps were that far-fetched sci-fi concept that had little to do with real-world problems. And now look at all these applications, most of which have already made a dent in the market, backed by high-flying brands. Therefore, decentralized apps are becoming more involved in day-to-day living, eliminating the need for third-party control and enabling users to manage their finances, data, and digital assets directly. We can also validate their positive dynamics by comparing stats from Dapp Radar. In 2021, over Unique Active Wallets (UAW) connected daily to a blockchain dapp. 2.7 million In 2019, this number didn’t climb higher than . 20K It seems like we’ve reached a milestone in 2021, so what’s next? Will the hype vanish and will dApps sink into oblivion? It doesn’t s seem so. What are hApps? Let’s address the elephant in the room: are still too young to claim dominance over traditional applications. Also, large-scale migration is still hampered by the lack of infrastructure and its complexity. Although I’m pretty positive that early-stage problems will be eliminated (remember the first BTC wallets?), decentralized technology has a plan B anyway. dApps Hybrid blockchain is a cross between traditional blockchain and centralized databases. This results in a perfect combination of the two different methods, leading to better security, lower cost, and faster transaction rates. One of the biggest problems with blockchain technology is its inability to handle high loads. This hinders its ability to be used for enterprise-level purposes. Hybrid blockchains were created using this realization which resulted in an increase in their utility for the development and deployment of applications requiring high levels of throughput. So why not apply the same principle to dApps while they’re still in their infancy? Thus, instead of making a major overhaul, we’ll secure a smooth transaction and a brighter dApp future by blending both centralized and decentralized capabilities. hApps are a combination of both traditional and decentralized applications that rely both on centralized and decentralized components. Just like hybrid blockchains, they can take the best from both worlds. Thus the back-end will rely on the salient blockchain features provided by smart contracts. The front-end will amalgamate both decentralized and centralized versions to match the computing power of any device. A centralized interface, for example, will be accessible for smartphones, while a decentralized one can be accessed via laptops. It also means that speed-intensive processes can be delegated to centralized servers to make confirmations faster. The Future of decentralized applications Decentralized awesomeness is certainly the man of the hour in 2022. According to Gartner, Blockchain is set to generate in new business value by 2030. It means that blockchain and blockchain-powered technologies like dApps will gain traction in the coming post-pandemic years. $3.1 trillion Is the future decentralized? It’s hard to say as we’re still standing at the onset of it. Nobody believed in humanoid robots and self-driving cars, remember? And here we are, watching the in its public demo. humanoid robot It seems to me that we are forging our way to a more decentralized future, that’s for sure. As for dApps, the numbers prove their tailwind and the growing user base. So whether it’ll be hApps first or purely decentralized applications, the very concept of them has already changed the tech landscape and made a statement on the global arena, securing its place in the post-pandemic reality.

Do dApps Have a Place Post-crypto Craze and What are hApps

Members of Congress Beat the Snot Out of Markets in 2021

Born in 2001, today SharePoint stays one of the most widely used enterprise collaboration solutions on the IT market. SharePoint serves enterprises both as a server-based (SharePoint On-Premises) and a cloud-based (SharePoint Online) web application that powers organizations in such areas as content management, document management, knowledge and innovation management, as well as enterprise-wide and team collaboration and communication. The popularity of SharePoint has increased dramatically once the platform became a part of the cloud Office 365 suite, thus being available for businesses of all sizes. According to the 2018 Global SharePoint and Office 365 survey, SharePoint Online adoption jumped from 31% in 2017 to 50% in 2018. Overall, there are more than 400K organizations using SharePoint worldwide. The IT market doesn’t remain indifferent to this trend, as more and more companies all over the world are starting to provide SharePoint services. Since SharePoint out-of-the-box comes as a set of features and tools, enterprises still need to put their effort into customizing the platform according to their needs and employees’ preferences. By using SharePoint default features and coupling them with custom solutions, organizations can build sophisticated corporate intranets, external-facing portals, CMSs, LMSs, DMSs and a variety of enterprise systems that cover different aspects of business processes. At the same time, the growing number of IT companies that provide SharePoint services makes it rather difficult to find a reliable partner with proper skills and experience. How to rate SharePoint consulting Below you will see a list of the most trustworthy SharePoint consulting companies that provide the full set of SharePoint-related services. The companies were analyzed and ranked according to five criteria: SharePoint expertise, companies’ statuses, and certificates, their major clients, offering strategy, and market responsiveness. The list will guide you through several key players on the SharePoint field and will help you find an optimal partner for your specific SharePoint projects. 1. Itransition Founded in 1998, Itransition is a Colorado-based custom software development company that delivers a large number of SharePoint services. The company offers SharePoint consulting, platform development, customization, implementation, update, integration with enterprise applications, and support. Itransition also helps its clients to train their staff on the SharePoint functionality. With a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner status and a skilled team of 300+ .NET developers on board, the company works with all versions of the platform and specializes in complex deeply customized enterprise SharePoint solutions. The company’s portfolio includes 800+ clients, among which are eBay, PayPal, Adidas, IBM, Expedia, and more. Itransition serves 30 countries all around the world. Denver, CO Location: $25 — $49 Rate per hour: Expedia, Toyota, eBay, PayPal, Adidas Clients: 1000–9999 Employees: Website: https://www.itransition.com/ 2. Neologic Software Solutions With more than 15 years of experience, Neologic is a leading SharePoint services provider in India. The company offers SharePoint development, migration, support, and configuration. Having more than 150 clients, Neologic delivers its SharePoint services to the US, UK, Canada, and UAE. Over the years of its operations, the company has acquired strong industry expertise. This allows Neologic to build full-featured industry-specific SharePoint solutions for Logistics, Government, Retail, and Hospitality. Trivandrum, Kerala, India Location: $50 — $99 Rate per hour: Cartoys, Mashalot, Hello Cabs, Royal College of Dentists of Canada Clients: 50–249 Employees: Website: http://www.nlindia.com/ 3. ImageTech Systems Since 1994, ImageTech has been providing solutions for Enterprise Content Management (ECM). It delivers a full stack of SharePoint services, including initial development/setup, maintenance, migration, and a complete deployment health check. The company offers its services on-site or remotely, by focusing on the Government, Finance, Logistics, and Healthcare industries and working with clients of all sizes. With an in-depth understanding of ECM technologies, the company excels in building up effective SharePoint-based content management solutions along with helping enterprises make these solutions an integral part of their business processes and employees’ everyday activities. Camp Hill, PA Location: Not Revealed Rate per hour: National Energy Company, Global Transportation and Logistics Company Clients: 10–49 Employees: Website: http://www.imagetechsys.com/ 4. Longi Engineering Founded in 1997, NY-based Longi Engineering has been a Microsoft Content and Collaboration partner for more than 15 years. The company delivers both server-based and cloud SharePoint solutions and provides organizations with SharePoint consulting, implementation, development, migration, and support. Being well-versed in SharePoint On-Premises deployments, today the company also handles SharePoint Online challenges and assists its customers in transitioning to the Office 365 environment. New York, NY Location: $100 — $149 Rate per hour: Legal Services of NYC, Affinity Health Plan, Garrett County Community Action Clients: 10–49 Employees: Website: https://www.longieng.com/ 5. Binary Republik Binary Republik is a company with extensive experience in all SharePoint platform versions. Today, the company’s service package includes SharePoint consulting, development, customization, integration, migration, and support. The company has built strong expertise in delivering SharePoint CMS and BI solutions, as well as custom SharePoint-based applications using the platform’s native strengths. Binary Republik’s partnerships list includes several SharePoint gurus, such as Microsoft, Sharegate, K2, and Umbraco. The company has a versatile portfolio of successfully accomplished projects for organizations that leverage the power of SharePoint in different parts of the world. Gujarat, India Location: $25 — $49 Rate per hour: Pegasystems, South Jersey Healthcare, USAmeriBank, Blythedale Children’s Hospital Clients: 50–249 Employees: Website: http://www.binaryrepublik.com/ 6. Businessware Technologies With more than 80 experts on board and 12 years of experience, Businessware Technologies is a professional provider of SharePoint services. The company helps with SharePoint consulting, intranet and extranet design, implementation, and development, SharePoint migration and support. Businessware Technologies is recognized as a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. The company’s SharePoint team has carried out 50+ projects of different complexity. The portfolio proves the company’s competencies in all SharePoint versions and their ability to turn the platform’s strengths into business advantages. Austin, TX Location: $25 — $49 Rate per hour: American Airlines, Delta, Samsung, Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, Alcoa Clients: 50–249 Employees: Website: http://businesswaretech.com/ 7. Dynamics Square Australia-based Dynamics Square is a consulting company that offers a wide number of business solutions based on the Microsoft technologies, including SharePoint. The company helps enterprises launch, set up, customize and tune their SharePoint deployments, as well as takes up the SharePoint upgrade, design, and migration. A strong knowledge of the Microsoft products, for example, Microsoft Dynamics or Power BI, enables the company to be a one-stop-shop for every company interested in implementing the Microsoft tech stack to foster their business processes. Sydney, Australia Location: Not Revealed Rate per hour: Kyocera, MSH, Discovery Science Center, Lanco Infratech Clients: 50–249 Employees: Website: http://www.dynamicssquare.com.au/ 8. Inquisitives Founded in 2001, Inquisitives is a software development company that has already served more than 300 clients worldwide. The company provides full-cycle SharePoint consulting and development services and designs custom ECM, BI, and document management solutions while coupling SharePoint out-of-the-box capabilities with unique custom-made features. The company has worked with such world-known companies as Samsung, Google, Yahoo!, Intel, and Xerox. Karachi, Pakistan Location: Not Revealed Rate per hour: Sanofi, Hermas, Google, Cisco, Itea Clients: 50–249 Employees: Website: http://inquisitives.com/ 9. Aufait Established in 2003, Aufait is an IT company that specializes in delivering SharePoint and Office 365 solutions and services. The company is recognized as a Gold Microsoft Content and Collaboration partner. Aufait’s offering includes full-cycle SharePoint development, consulting, UI/UX design, and migration. Apart from providing the core SharePoint services, Aufait brings in ready-to-use SharePoint solutions that are to cut enterprises’ costs on the platform’s initial customization. Aufait’s partners can leverage the tuned e-tendering and performance management solutions, as well as a pre-set SharePoint intranet for dynamic team collaboration. Bangalore, India Location: $25 — $49 Rate per hour: Oman Air, Saudi Aramco, Edenred, Paladion Clients: 50–249 Employees: Website: https://aufait.in/ 10. Cotek Systems Cotek Systems is a Georgia-based software consulting company, whose expertise lies in enterprise content management, customer relationship management, applications development, and integration. SharePoint is one of the key technologies that form the company’s service pack. Cotek Systems provides SharePoint consulting, platform governance, training, integration, and migration. The company’s offering is extended with a wide set of SharePoint add-ins, ready-made apps that enable companies to enrich the functionality of their SharePoint-based solutions with no additional coding. Among the company’s clients are Coca Cola, Linda Consulting, Comcast, and Dexia. Norcross, GA Location: $50 — $99 Rate per hour: Coca Cola, Atlanta Comcast, Dexia, Baltimore Standard Chartered Bank Clients: 10–49 Employees: Website: http://www.cotekinc.com/ What’s next for SharePoint consulting companies? Enterprise content management and team collaboration are here to stay. And so do SharePoint consultants. But with time and especially with the platform updates, our top 10 might look differently. Some companies will keep up with the progress of SharePoint, while others might lag behind or change their technology focus. We will continue to carefully monitor changes in the SharePoint consulting and development landscape to deliver an updated rating of vendors in a year or so.

Top SharePoint Consulting Companies

People often see the Industrial Internet of Things in a narrow view, namely, the ability to increase efficiency, and cost savings. While that is true, it is a limited list of benefits based upon one’s understanding of connectivity, data and information to influence behavior. There are several ways to lead organizational change, and it all depends on one’s role and how they view their role in the organization. productivity As an example, this month I attended a NORA (National Oil Recyclers Association) Environmental, Health & Safety workshop as a speaker. NORA represents the leading liquid recycling companies in used oil, antifreeze, oil filters & absorbents, parts cleaning, wastewater and chemicals. NORA’s primary mission has been aiding in the development of the EPA’s used oil management standards, including avoiding the damaging hazardous waste designation for used oil. This was not my typical audience for IoT discussions so I had to think about presenting information in a way that would be valuable for the audience. As such, I took away a lot from that preparation process and from my interactions with the attendees. Again, the common theme is productivity in the process industry or discrete manufacturing, and the machines running smoothly and efficiently and overall productivity is the goal. However, there are many incidents where we are not moving from good productivity to better, we are looking at serious catastrophic events. Figures 1–4 illustrate that modern and measurement can avoid very serious issues related to pumps, fans and motors. Specifically, you can add continuous monitoring for bearing fault detection by measuring peak acceleration of the bearing as well as overall vibration, temperature, humidity on rotating machines. That continuous monitoring will provide the data and insight for 30–90 days to lead preemptive action ahead of unplanned maintenance. Realize we cannot all put in new machines, but rather need to implement these solutions as IIoT bolt-on additions to existing equipment. I would further argue that there is a need to monitor essential assets as a reliability program, not only the critical assets integrated into PLC or SCADA systems. technology Figure 1: Pump Seal Leak resulting in a vapor cloud and fire. Figure 2: Vibration study at a gas plant simulating the root cause in a weld break and release of compressed gas. Figure 3 illustrates chronic lubrication failure causing repeat fires on a DDG dryer fan at an ethanol plant. Figure 4 is long-term fan imbalance causing looseness and leading to failure and safety risks. Figure 5 is a biomass boiler where solids fuel silo blew its lid off. The cause was a failed bearing which ignited the explosive dust. One area of commonality I found across every industrial company is that they want and need safety improvements, as fewer injuries leads to better productivity, lower costs and higher morale. The idea of embracing the measurement of productivity of manufacturing processes through the lens of safety and reliability is relatively new, but studies clearly show that as the OEE (operational equipment efficiency) goes up safety incidents go down as seen in the graph below. Machines often cause injuries when they malfunction, thus, proactive maintenance or further predictive maintenance is enabled by things like condition monitoring and bearing fault detection in rotating equipment like pumps, fans and motors. Further studies also show that the largest single cause of plant incidents is mechanical failure. However, operators lack the feedback to know they are abusing the machinery. In the past, the technology needed to understand what was happening inside the machine continuously either wasn’t available or was cost prohibitive. A forward-thinking maintenance manager could utilize a vibration analyst or service technician with advanced diagnostics to determine root cause or keep the plant running on a point by point basis. Now today, with IIoT sensors and analytics, continuous condition monitoring is available in a cost-effective manner to have information flowing in real-time to further enhance productivity, efficiency, health and safety. This last graphic illustrates how productivity, reliability and safety are related. The more predictive and automated an organization moves toward, the lower the maintenance costs, higher visibility and translates into worker safety. This was illustrated with Paul O’Neill while CEO of Alcoa, where safety was his metric for success, well documented in Charles Duhigg’s book, . Injuries were extremely high and his mantra was a zero-injury goal. Over his 13 years as CEO, Alcoa’s net income grew 5-fold. If an organization moves past cost savings and to a overall larger goal, the Industrial Internet of Things can only benefit us all. The Power of Habit Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on March 8, 2017.

Safety and Reliability as a Cornerstone of Industrial IoT Deployments

-> Source As the breadth of new subculture segments increases, to these communities is becoming harder to scale. marketing Who remembers these movies? North Shore, where a lonely Arizonan breaks into the radical pro surfing culture on Oahu. Rad, where a persistent BMX rider is determined to take on the Helltrack despite many obstacles. Donnie Brasco, where an undercover agent infiltrates the mafia. These movies all provide a realistic analogy of the inclusive exclusivity of micro-cultures. If we go back 60 years, our marketing segments were much more homogenized and binary, in the sense of cool|not-cool, athlete|nerd, pretty|average, good|evil, smoker|non-smoker, clean|dirty, homemaker|breadwinner, man|woman, sweater|jacket, ketchup|mustard, red|menthol. These more binary social/cultural constructions also led to easier segmentation of customers into larger ‘buckets.’ Marginal interest groups were marketed to on back pages and local newsprint at best. Sexist Alcoa Aluminum ad Internet culture has changed everything. We’re seeing thousands of micro-communities emerge as positive, creative and inclusive respites for a new tide of special interests. This is creating an incredible breadth of community content to market against. As their breadth continues to increase, micro-cultures also remain nuanced and exclusive, creating new challenges for marketers. In his 1996 book , Professor Robert Shields and some of his contemporaries explored the ideas of Internet sub-cultures very early on. 19 years ago Professor Shields wrote: Cultures of the Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies New discursive norms are being invented and disseminated on the Internet and from there ‘infect’ the design, layout and textual strategies of advertising, literary works and research reports.[…]It is essential to treat computer-mediated communication as a process involving differentiated ‘bodies.’ The tendency has been to treat all users as alike according to a stereotype of young, socially inept and thus culturally marginalized male ‘computer addicts.’ Professor Shields’ notes underscore the importance of this rapidly growing space of Internet culture and the general misunderstanding of it’s cultural phenomena, which have taken on great importance in the consciousness of young people. These new communities are not unlike the punk music, skateboarding and surfing communities of the 80s and 90s. Marketers have always required an authentic connection to touch and influence these groups. Any communications that were outside of what the community considered authentic would be quickly deflected and/or ostracized. Consider the success of Reddit and it’s hyper-moderated list groups. These function in just the same way. With new micro-cultures emerging around interests like pizza, cats, memes, yoga, crossfit, footwear, crafts, wellness, normcore, fit goth, seapunk, furries, otherkin, survival, webcams, fan fiction, and many more, marginalized obscurity is the new ‘normal.’ Few people talk about why the majority of online companies, particularly e-commerce and non-platform SaaS, are so hard to scale. Many have raised $100M dollars, yet struggle to turn a profit as online customers are harder to find, isolate and impress. It is becoming more difficult for our online ad units to create an authentic connection with viewers because their online interests are becoming hyper-nuanced and continually informed by a new real-time culture, i.e. a finitely engaged and fundamentally distracted Internet culture. Cultural fragmentation away from the status quo continues at an accelerated pace. E-pollution is out of control. And so, we take this rapidly expanding Internet culture space, with all of its nuance, breadth and complexity, and we layer on top of it the most vile, often unmentioned cancer on the web: Bots. According to a study by Incapsula, . According to the Wall Street Journal, over . This is scary stuff and applicable to every class of online ad: video, search, affiliate, streaming, display. During my time building data warehouses and analytics products, I can say that these reports are completely consistent with what I’ve seen in the real world. over 50% of current web traffic could be different forms of fraudulent ‘bot’ traffic 30% of our paid advertising clicks could also be from fraudulent bots Authenticity as the only currency moving forward. With all of the cultural fragmentation and low-quality traffic, we have to take a much closer look at brand narrative and content. How do we speak to all of these micro-cultures instead of just describing them as attributes in a database of millions? Authenticity of brand communication and narrative has never been more important. Sincere connection will be the future currency of marketing products online. [ ] Tweet this The allure of web-scale often distracts our brands from a truly unique identity and narrative. Even more troubling for marketers, we find that micro-community influencers like , , , , , , , , , and have become the new narrators of ‘cool.’ It is becoming much more difficult for brands to compete with content that commodifies brands and champions unique community-driven narratives. Adam Gallagher Veronica Belmont Gregory Han Justine Ezarik Christian Kimber Annaka Linowska Abdulqadir Johnie Gall Karl-Edwin Guerre Tom Emrich Authenticity is not the same as personalization. Knowing if I’m male or female, or knowing that my zip code is 90254, is not the same as marketing to my . Cultural connection requires authenticity and knowledge of a nuanced complexity of language, semantics, tone and color. Often this is ‘tribal’ information, changing organically with the community. culture A great example of authentic micro-culture marketing with larger mass influence is . , Founder and Creative Director explains, “Poler is meant to inspire people to reconnect with the outdoors in simple everyday ways that are meaningful to them. Because of this, we’ve seen great support across different culture segments like outdoor exploration, hiking, car camping, skateboarding, snowboarding, surfing and dirtbiking. Also, because of our unique content and storytelling, Poler has really been embraced by a spectrum of influencers, artists and content creators.” Poler Outdoor Stuff Benji Wagner Poler Outdoor Stuff, Portland, OR flagship display The wider the scope of our online marketing programs, the more our content needs to be customized to meet the cultural expectations of each visitor. This goes far beyond just contextual and personalized customization. This will be the big challenge for brands in the next decade. The future may dictate that each new customer segment require an entirely new narrative and marketing strategy. Some of our tech-focused CRM companies are just scratching the surface of this new reality, companies like , , , , . SailThru Retention Science Afinity Custora RichRelevance The honesty of scale. In order to grow sustainably, we need to be honest about the potential scale of our products. For example, e-commerce brands sometimes confuse themselves with platforms, anticipating unrealistic organic growth. Some of our products seem to sell themselves, either from brilliant design execution or broad platform dynamics. The last decade has clearly shown us that content communities and platforms matter. If a company can combine revenue generation with platform dynamics, the possibilities are great. In this case, micro-communities can adopt, self-select and enforce their cultures on each platform while driving incremental revenue in specialized segments. We have seen this with companies like Slack, VBulletin, IFTTT, Salesforce, Heroku, Shopify, Magento, Pinterest and more. The reality of Internet marketing for a non-platform product is brutal. If we are paying $1 per click for qualified traffic and 2% of our new visitors make a purchase, that means it costs us $100 per hundred people and we get two purchasers. If we sell our product for $40, we might make $15 in ( ). So we’ve made $30 for our two purchases and spent $100, which leaves us with a . Let’s say our LTV is $120 (or three purchases), that would be six purchases across the lifetime of our two new customers, which would result in $90 in gross margin. We still end up with a over the lifetime of these new customers for our $100 spent on clicks. gross margin link to great slide deck $70 loss $10 loss Because our current content production model cannot keep up with the pace of micro-community growth, it might cost $100,000 of these ads to find $10k of sustainably reproducible traffic. Need more scale, $10M to find $1M of reproducible traffic, and so on. “Micro-testing campaigns with authentic content is so important,” says Dirk McGregor, VP of Customer Acquisition at Regent Equity Partners, whose portfolio companies generate over $300M in revenue. “I think what we’re seeing on the larger market are companies scaling too wide with their standard ad campaigns from day one. They sadly end up losing a substantial piece of that investment without first considering the rising tide of low-quality traffic on today’s networks. Without a disciplined approach, it’s tough to find the quick scale people often expect.” How do we scale in this new era? Given our new reality, we not only need to focus on authentic content and narrative, but we also need to limit our financial risk when testing new audiences. While more traditional growth initiatives like email marketing, affiliate marketing, physical events, and traditional lead-generation have a much lower risk profile, they do not scale as quickly as display advertising (which is growing to include internet radio, video and various new social ad units). Just like using , we can also apply these core ideas to scale our marketing initiatives. We want to reduce our risk profile, or batch size, as much as possible in order to test our hypotheses, i.e. spend less, learn more. We can achieve this with disciplined hypothesis testing for new audience segments. Lean methodologies for product development Something like this is a good start: Construct our new audience hypothesis, i.e. develop narrative, content, ads and communication strategy for our new audience. Micro-test our hypothesis, i.e. run ads, emails, social. Include A/B/C/D testing wherever possible. Set a tight limit to our initial spend. Review our data. Clean our traffic sources, i.e. block fraudulent and/or non-performing sources. Adjust our strategy. Repeat. Programmatic buying can provide efficient, larger scale. If we take the Lean approach, we increase our chances for success and remove a large amount of waste/risk from our advertising machine. If we can combine this methodology with real tech and significant resources for , content production and targeting across large ad networks, we have a much better chance for sustainable scale. When we talk about this, we are saying that we can automate our audience segment testing and analysis, including partial automation of content production. Obviously this is no small task. programmatic buying Many search companies have proven this model, companies like Culture Machine, TubeMogul, 26.2 Media Agency, Dex Media, CampusExplorer, YP.com, Rubicon, [ more research on this, these are probably no longer relevant… ] Content production must adapt to a large number of customer segments. As we successfully test our audience segments and develop new narratives, authentic content production will become a large cost center. We see companies like , , , , and creating efficiencies in the content lifecycle. Can we merge cultural understanding with authentic content production at scale? Tongal Kapost Marketo Infusionsoft Hubspot Enter the ‘Culture Manager.’ As a general rule, founding level employees build the first culture narrative for a product or service. What about the next audience segment? What if there are 1,000s of these audience segments? It’s a scary idea that as conversion rates drop and Internet pollution increases by orders of magnitude, we might need experts for each micro-culture to create a narrative effective enough to break through the noise. Who is this person? Is this a new position entirely? I think it might be. This person is almost an Internet anthropologist, in charge of understanding several important micro-cultures. Jason Provisor, Head of Marketing Strategy at , expands on this idea: “Many of the companies we work with are too close to their own brands. It’s the age of the consumer. You no longer tell, you ask. At Tongal we’ve built a platform that crowdsources insights from within important micro-cultures to drive marketing content production. It’s no longer about creating ads, but creating narratives that resonate with each community.” Tongal Our primary paradigm in the ‘lean startup’ era is to just follow the data; test everything, measure everything and respond to the data. Unfortunately this is not going to help much if our marketers or product developers are completely detached from the micro-cultures they are meant to serve. If we use the example of the skateboarding and surfing communities, imagine a fresh Ivy League MBA who grew up playing competitive chess and doubles badminton trying to ‘learn’ his way into marketing to these communities, it would be a massacre. Open our coats and compress our learnings. Much of what we’re seeing is the confluence of a new breadth of Internet micro-cultures and the new reality of Internet ad performance. In many ways, we have been collectively floating down a widening river into a vast ocean of marketing inefficiencies, a black hole of phantom clicks and ad narrative lost in translation. Surely there is no single formula to combat our new reality. Risk mitigation is generally my number one priority. While it’s easy and fun to spend VC money and corporate display budgets on underperforming ads, . An honest and introspective approach to building new products and authentic culture narratives, together with lean testing of new audience segments will be essential in the coming years. perhaps that’s more a sign of the times than a long-term strategy

Marketing To New Micro-Cultures Difficult As Web Grows

In the Alcove

Facebook recently saw a massive but we all know what’s really going on. They have seen a and according to Lou Kerner at salon.com the engagement slide in their article is proof that Facebook is dying. drop in share prices and blamed Apple also huge drop off in users Maybe this article is related to that. When you hand over your personal information to an online entity, what do you expect in return? In a world where data is increasingly seen as a valuable commodity, consumers need to be aware of the underlying terms of data exchange. This piece for Hackernoon develops and discusses that identifies four key criteria (data ownership, data intimacy, data permanence, and data value). They make-up consumers' perceptions of the terms of the data exchange. a conceptual framework It also discusses my high-functioning alcoholism, which is the real reason you clicked on this, right? This article is going to be a thrill ride, so buckle up. I almost called this article: "Why can't I know exactly what kind of asshole I am? WITH data visualizations, GRAPHS and ANALYTICS? When other people already know?" Let's Start With ShabuShabu and a Highball I was sitting and procrastinating. I have high-functioning alcoholism, and that day I had eaten an enormous amount of ShabuShabu and drank two glasses of wine. It was at a bustling restaurant in Tokyo's Akihabara district. I was finally back home and working through my second Japanese Highball (Whiskey Soda) at my desk in my tiny Tokyo apartment with the heater on full blast like a languid feline. I had editing to do and I didn't want to write or edit. I wanted to read. But, when I opened up to get some procrastination-reading done, I realized I was an asshole. Allow me to explain. Hackernoon's Noonification email I received it on February 5th, 2022, 01:02 Tokyo Time. "How are you, @sarahothman?" It asked. There were a bunch of articles. I originally wrote what they were but I edited it out of this article because who cares, I didn’t read them. And, then there was also an article about . I felt angry about that one because . saying no to your boss and about how sometimes it's necessary sometimes that's necessary If the #MeToo movement taught us anything, surely it taught us that sometimes saying no to our bosses should also be accompanied by f*&king restraining orders. I didn't read it. Sorry, @vinitabansai. It's probably GREAT! And, finally, there was an article called: " ." I didn't read that either. Why? Because I'm arrogant and I already know that. I've read J.G Ballard and a bunch of other sci-fi authors. I know about the future. Guys, don't tell me J.G Ballard isn't sci-fi. AI is Not the Future. You Need it Today Sighing and taking a deep swig of my high ball, several disparate thoughts and recent memories coalesced and I realized: I'm an asshole. But, more importantly, I'm a very specific type of asshole. I was reminded of the recent hit movie: Don't Look Up. Not just the movie generally, because of the amount I was reveling in — or (more importantly) — despite the fact I was using them as a procrastination distraction, but because of not reading things not knowing things a specific scene. There's a scene in the movie, where a slightly cheese-fry fluffed Leonardo Dicaprio is ripped into by a wig-wearing Mark Rylance for calling him a 'Business Man' and it goes like this: PETER ISHERWELL Did you call me a businessman? RANDALL You do own a corporate— PETER ISHERWELL You think I’m just a businessman? Do you think you know me, Doctor? Business? This is evolution. This is the evolution of the human species. (To President Orlean) What are you doing bringing this— (Back to Randall) Did you know that BASH has over 40 million data points on you and every decision you’ve made since 1994, Doctor? I know when you have colon polyps months before your doctor does. You’ve got four or five at the moment, actually... You know, they’re not of concern, but I’d have a checkup as soon as you can. (MORE) PETER ISHERWELL (CONT'D) But more importantly than that, much more importantly, I know what you are. I know who you are. My algorithms have determined eight fundamental consumer profile types. You are a Lifestyle Idealist. You think you are motivated by beliefs, high ethical beliefs, but you just run towards pleasure and away from pain. Like a field mouse. RANDALL (almost in a whisper) I just want to make sure the science is sound on this project. I hope you understand — (Isherwell gets right in Randall’s face) PETER ISHERWELL Our algorithms can even predict how you’ll die with up to 96% accuracy. I looked you up after we first met. Your death was so unremarkable and boring... I can’t even remember what it said. Apart from one thing. You’re going to die alone. Randall shakes his head. PETER ISHERWELL (CONT'D) Alone. If you’ll excuse me Madam President. I’ve got some work to do. (Isherwell leaves) PRESIDENT ORLEAN What the hell are you doing? My God... RANDALL I’m trying to do my job. PRESIDENT ORLEAN You are just so lucky Peter adores you. (President Orlean lights up a cigarette with a GIANT: “HIGHLY FLAMMABLE” warning sign behind her) RANDALL I wouldn’t-- PRESIDENT ORLEAN You are with the grown-ups now Randall. And, I realized, knowing what I know about views, open rates, and a gazillion other metrics and consumer data points that we could use to measure engagement or audience suitability I have a unique set of prejudices that I am not in any way aware of. I know more about the prejudices of other people who I have never met than my own prejudices and more dangerously than that, I have no access to that data. A company like Facebook (META) will provide me with the data that I give to them. For example, I can request to download my own chat logs. But, I think it's harder for me to universally access consumer profile data about myself. Somehow, multiple online touchpoints have played the system, so that a company can buy that data about my preferences but I don't have a universal hub in which I can view consumer profile data about myself. Why? I can pay to see my credit rating, right? According to Wikipedia the top 3 credit rating agencies in the USA are S&P Global Ratings, Moody's, and Fitch Group. Why can't I pay to see my asshole rating? According To The Experts, It's Complicated In the study that I highlighted at the top of this article, the researchers had this to say: "As online and digital transformations disrupt their business, retailers are aware of the crucial role of collecting, analyzing, and translating consumer data into competitive advantages. It is quite popular to call data the “new oil” of our economies, or a currency that customers and firms might use to trade off costs and benefits in their interactions. Social media, new digital solutions, and the have led to an enormous volume of data being generated every day ( ). Coinciding with this, 62% of consumers feel they cannot get through a day without being tracked ( ). Yet, big quantities of data do not guarantee benefits to the retailer, and often come with inherent risks." internet of things Wedel and Kannan 2016 Auxier et al. 2019 The researchers go on to talk about GDPR and consumers blocking information on their devices but neither of these things are considerable risks from either a consumer or business perspective. The biggest risk, with its massively declining user numbers and explosive stock market decline, is a boycott of services. It's people logging in and deleting their accounts. as Facebook has seen Why can't I know exactly what kind of asshole I am? WITH GRAPHS and ANALYTICS when other people already know. I can only guess why I didn't read every article in my Hackernoon Noonification email, but I want to know more. I want to know about my prejudices so that I can address them. What's Data Ownership? Data ownership is the perceived right of an individual to control the use and sharing of their personal data. It includes the understanding that individuals have power over their data — the ability to access, correct, amend, or delete it as they see fit. What's Data Intimacy? Data intimacy is the perceived level of personal privacy consumers believe that they have in their data. It includes the understanding that individuals’ data will not be used or shared inappropriately, and that there are limits to what can be done with consumer-firm relationships. What's Data Permanence? Data permanence is the perceived length of time that personal data will be accessible and usable. It includes the understanding that companies will not delete or alter information without consumer consent, and that individuals have a right to access their data for an extended period. What's Data Value? Data value is the perceived worth of personal data to individuals. It includes the understanding that individuals are entitled to receive some form of compensation for the use of their personal data. Aha! Data value is the most important fundamental transactional factor. Companies are profiting off my data value and it’s ‘the new oil’ but I have no way to profit off it myself (or even use it to search deep inside myself and become a better person) and even if I did… such as online surveys, I would be paid peanuts. According to some sources, okay, , the data of LinkedIn users was worth about $260 per monthly active user to Microsoft Corp when it acquired the professional network in 2016. James E. Short and Steve Todd at MIT And then, in 2017 those two guys produced about how: “Making implicit data policies explicit, codified, and sharable across the company is a first step in prioritizing data value.” a whole MIT Sloan white paper In 2019 a bill was considered that would have given Americans information about they give to Google and Facebook was worth. how much the ad-targeting data Maybe one day we can work together to make a way for people to transparently see their consumer profiles and prejudices. And, maybe then I can tackle the amount of masterful, absolutely ingenious, targeted alcohol advertising I receive. Does anyone wanna’ build a consumer profiling data analytics company where the consumers own their personal data and are the only people who profit off it? If you do, I’ll be the first in line to find out exactly what type of asshole I am. You can pay me, for me to find out.

Facebook, The Cost of Consumer Profiling: Or My High Functioning Alcoholism

Sales of soda drinks in the U.S. have been declining for around a decade while non-alcoholic beverage sales reached in just a single year.  This is just one of several indicators that the non-alcoholic beverage market is booming.  With rapid growth and innovation, five key markets have shown high popularity with consumers. $919 billion One market involves functional waters, which is still or sparkling water that includes additives such as vitamins, acids, herbs, and fruits.  Its convenience and helpful effects on human nutrition as well as the addition of ingredients that support weight loss increases its popularity with consumers, but the fluctuations in costs causes some to choose other alternatives.  Another growing market is organic beverages, which several brands are crafting to help customers with their health.  Factors such as growing awareness of the health benefits of organic products and consumer preference for drinks that are naturally flavored have helped organic beverages to be more appealing to the public. Those who want to avoid sugary drinks rely on ready-to-drink (RTD) coffees, which can be considered a natural energy drink.  Although consumers can buy RTD coffee in cans and bottles from their local store, several people have shifted to creating their own coffee at home during the COVID-19 pandemic.  For those who want a caffeine-free energy boost, herbal and oxidized tea can do the job.  The cold brews and plant-based milk blends that have revamped the cold tea category and the increased awareness of the public towards healthy lifestyle habits have helped tea to become the new coffee for many. However, for those who cannot let go of coffee, there are brands that are offering RTD alcoholic beverages that include ingredients that are good for you as well as a range of flavors to enjoy.  The growing desire of consumers to drink low- or no- alcohol content beverages and the appeal of RTD alcoholic drinks featuring new and amusing flavors have made it a fun alternative to regular alcohol.  Bars have also taken part in the alcohol-free trend by offering a .  These mixed drinks allow young adults to focus on healthier options while still being able to partake in the bar scene. mocktail The non-alcoholic beverage trend is here to stay, but are you ready to say cheers to it?

The Rise of Non-Alcoholic Beverages: Trends to Keep an Eye On

Product Hypothesis Validation: Best Practices & Examples

Hybrid Meta-Heuristic for Efficient Course Timetabling

At some point, too many people will have lost too much Bitcoin that they will meet to talk about it. Later, they will opt to do something about it. There can only be a (decreasing number) of bitcoins Lost cryptocurrency is a unique beast, quite different from lost information for 2 reasons: 1. We can continue maintaining its value. Right? Is it really still valuable? 2. Other people know it is lost. They simply check the blockchain. Whereas with lost information, nobody else can tell except those who have lost that intel. Take Bitcoin as an example. We still say 'There can only be 21 million'. But if this includes even lost bitcoins, then we are counting our losses as assets! That is very strange. Imagine if you were an accountant for a major company. The company deals in all sorts of assets, but sometimes writes some physical assets off as lost either due to theft, fire outbreak, or irreparable damage. But to your shock, the manager insists that not only do you keep counting those assets, but also, count them as fully functional assets whose value is going up every year. "But they are damaged", you might say. "Yeah, but they are still our assets" "What, how?" "There is hope we can recover them exactly as they were before they were lost. And then some". It’s hard to fathom. It indeed feels like Alice in Wonderland, where cards talk, a piece of cake can make one bigger, or smaller, and a cat can disappear leaving only its grin behind. Bitcoin and most crypto are the same. The question is thus; Is real value riding on all coins? Even when some are lost? Certainly, supply and demand economics might make all the coins feel equally valuable hence we would say that if Bitcoin is at $70,000 then the market cap is $1.47 trillion. But taking the figures as per this reddit post on lost bitcoins, if 6 million are lost then only 15 million coins are existing which are backed by a market cap of $1.05 trillion. Less by $420 billion. This does deflate our dreams and begs the question --> are we kidding ourselves? The road to Zero bitcoins By some estimates, 4% of 21,000,000 bitcoins continue to be lost every year. How many shall be lost, going forward? Let's assume this 4% holds true. 4% × 21,000,000 = 840,000 bitcoins. This is very steep. Well then, in 15 years, we shall lose 840,000 * 15 = 12,600,000 Add 6 million to this batch and circa 2039, 'There can only be 2,400,000 bitcoins' When will they be finished? Now, a little hope is in order. The 4% cannot hold steady forever, so it would be wise to say it too will be a declining figure as we progress. Because as Bitcoins get more valuable, people will be more careful with their keys. It is inevitable. Taking it at face value though, we shall run out of bitcoins to trade within the next 18 years. So Circa 2042. I hope the naysayers will be back to tell us they told us so, or to plead guilty of doomism and explain why there are still many millions of Bitcoins being traded daily. However, it certainly looks like way before the year 2137 when the last satoshi will be mined, we shall hit a big wall as per the coins lost vs the coins in the available supply. When enough is enough, for lost Bitcoins Assume at the time this shocking reality hits the Bitcoin community, we have only 4 million coins tradable around the world. Assume even Michael Saylor shall have lost some of his keys/coins. What then? Well, the price of a single coin, feeling so much demand, will spike to about $10 million, and then it will dawn on everybody. Bitcoin has a $40 trillion market capitalization and not a $210 trillion market capitalization. Right now, this is an elephant 🐘 in the Bitcoin room, but it is still a baby and we are all happy to pet it and feed it with careless abandon. Soon, however, it will become a giant. A big fat frustration. At $10 trillion per coin, the fees to move even a few sats will likely be thousands of dollars because; a) the Bitcoin reward is smaller. b) miners have also lost their coins. c) losing coins to hackers will be most likely (hackers will be sniffing all over every wallet, waiting for the SSL to get some slight holes) Everybody will be losing coins. It will be wild. But before I proceed? Why do people lose keys hence coins? Well, if you are using the key every time, sometimes changing it this way and that way to maintain your security (because AI powered cameras may be watching), it so happens that you are bound to make a mistake and lose the key. Or else, be hacked (since you cannot fathom changing the key all the time). Like smart people must have said, meat brains are not good at holding random numbers or random sequences of words. Luke Dash Jnr, a seasoned cypherpunk, was hacked last year. He lost 200 bitcoins. Elon Musk may have lost his Bitcon keys back in '20. So, shit happens. To hard fork those lost coins back, or not. That is the question So here's the thing. We wake up and Bitcoin is seizing up. Crashing into its mass and threatening to take our financial dreams with it when it turns into a black hole of lost keys / burned coins. We also wake up and realize that the debt spiral is still sucking us down with it, even as we hodl Bitcoin. Climate is now a real issue and oh, AI is giving us headaches. Too many addictive cat videos. Too many coins are lost, the blocks are always full so confirmations take decades, the core software is too large, the fees are too high. So we sit down, like AA group members, and decide that continuing to preach financial freedom yet the currency is fast tending towards technological obsolescence, is like being high on alcohol and thinking that one is blissful for other reasons. We need to quit the 'lost coins are good for all' alcohol. In short, it will be time for a hard fork. The Hard Fork --> Bitcoin ver. 2.0 Innovation comes full circle. After factoring in the reality of available supply and not merely supply, we could let Satoshi Nakamoto's 2 million or so coins be our target practice and our saving grace. One shot and bull’s eye. Trillions of dollars pour down from the Bitcoin piñata. Like manna from the heavens. Right? Alas, There shall only be 4 million bitcoins and the value of lost coins, if "re-supplied" to the blockchain, will quickly deflate the value of the 4 million coins existing. Overall, lost coins would have helped the remaining coins get valuable to that point. Say $10 million per BTC. If you un-lose them by the most brute force of them all -- a hard fork -- you shock the demand economics and viola, have worth-less bitcoins than you started with. Now whoever is holding their previously un-lost bitcoins cannot be happy about that. It begs the question, what would they do? Refuse the hard fork outright. Obviously. Indeed, even if the value of the bitcoins would overall increase the market cap of the available supply, we can be damn sure it would reduce the value of each individual coin. Supply and Demand. Economics 101. The Big Question: Is this a financial revolution for the better, or for the worse? For example, let's say we had 4 million coins left. We then redeem the coins in the wallets of those proven deceased without any heir. Say Satoshi Finney is that first choice. At $10 million per coin, 4 million coins give up a market cap of 40 trillion USD. Add 2 million coins to the available supply but have the price shocked from 10 million to only 7 million. Total availability supply = 6 million. 6 million x 7 million USD = 42 trillion dollars. It is a good financial explosion. But to whom? Who gets the money?? Who makes the ultimate sacrifice of accepting to end up with less money than before? If rational and educated human beings cannot agree on simple (obvious) things like "Are fossil fuels necessary for economic progress or not?", how can they agree on how to share this pie? It is a financial explosion, except the majority will not want it. Satoshi may have solved the Byzantine General's problem. Somebody needs to solve the "Goodness of the community over the Goodness of the individual" problem. Of course, with my limited brains, I know most people are wary of a Marxist dystopia sliding in during this very crucial process. E.g. The coins could instead be coded to go to a handful of powerful individuals, whereas before it seemed like they would go to people who deserved a financial turnaround. Especially in the wake of what we see today with government debt ballooning, government operatives hoping to snatch some of this reclaimed BTC so as to help the government pay its gigantic debt is not an impossibility. Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place. Not the best kind of sandwich. At some point, too many people will have lost too much Bitcoin that they will meet to talk about it. Bitcoin Later, they will opt to do something about it. There can only be a (decreasing number) of bitcoins L ost cryptocurrency is a unique beast, quite different from lost information for 2 reasons: ost cryptocurrency is a unique beast, quite different from lost information for 2 reasons: 1. We can continue maintaining its value. Right? Is it really still valuable? Is it really still valuable? really 2. Other people know it is lost. They simply check the blockchain. Whereas with lost information, nobody else can tell except those who have lost that intel. Take Bitcoin as an example. We still say 'There can only be 21 million'. But if this includes even lost bitcoins, then we are counting our losses as assets! That is very strange. Imagine if you were an accountant for a major company. The company deals in all sorts of assets, but sometimes writes some physical assets off as lost either due to theft, fire outbreak, or irreparable damage. But to your shock, the manager insists that not only do you keep counting those assets, but also, count them as fully functional assets whose value is going up every year. " But they are damaged ", you might say. But they are damaged " Yeah, but they are still our assets " Yeah, but they are still our assets " What, how? " What, how? " There is hope we can recover them exactly as they were before they were lost. There is hope we can recover them exactly as they were before they were lost. And then some ". And then some It’s hard to fathom. It indeed feels like Alice in Wonderland, where cards talk, a piece of cake can make one bigger, or smaller, and a cat can disappear leaving only its grin behind. Bitcoin and most crypto are the same. The question is thus; Is real value riding on all coins? Even when some are lost? Certainly, supply and demand economics might make all the coins feel equally valuable hence we would say that if Bitcoin is at $70,000 then the market cap is $1.47 trillion. But taking the figures as per this reddit post on lost bitcoins , if 6 million are lost then only 15 million coins are existing which are backed by a market cap of $1.05 trillion. reddit post on lost bitcoins Less by $420 billion. This does deflate our dreams and begs the question --> are we kidding ourselves? The road to Zero bitcoins By some estimates , 4% of 21,000,000 bitcoins continue to be lost every year. some estimates How many shall be lost, going forward? Let's assume this 4% holds true. 4% × 21,000,000 = 840,000 bitcoins. This is very steep. Well then, in 15 years, we shall lose 840,000 * 15 = 12,600,000 Add 6 million to this batch and circa 2039, 'There can only be 2,400,000 bitcoins' When will they be finished? Now, a little hope is in order. The 4% cannot hold steady forever, so it would be wise to say it too will be a declining figure as we progress. Because as Bitcoins get more valuable, people will be more careful with their keys. It is inevitable. Taking it at face value though, we shall run out of bitcoins to trade within the next 18 years. So Circa 2042. I hope the naysayers will be back to tell us they told us so, or to plead guilty of doomism and explain why there are still many millions of Bitcoins being traded daily. However, it certainly looks like way before the year 2137 when the last satoshi will be mined, we shall hit a big wall as per the coins lost vs the coins in the available supply. When enough is enough, for lost Bitcoins Assume at the time this shocking reality hits the Bitcoin community, we have only 4 million coins tradable around the world. Assume even Michael Saylor shall have lost some of his keys/coins. What then? Well, the price of a single coin, feeling so much demand, will spike to about $10 million, and then it will dawn on everybody. Bitcoin has a $40 trillion market capitalization and not a $210 trillion market capitalization. Right now, this is an elephant 🐘 in the Bitcoin room, but it is still a baby and we are all happy to pet it and feed it with careless abandon. Soon, however, it will become a giant. A big fat frustration. At $10 trillion per coin, the fees to move even a few sats will likely be thousands of dollars because; a) the Bitcoin reward is smaller. b) miners have also lost their coins. c) losing coins to hackers will be most likely (hackers will be sniffing all over every wallet, waiting for the SSL to get some slight holes) Everybody will be losing coins. It will be wild. But before I proceed? Why do people lose keys hence coins? Well, if you are using the key every time, sometimes changing it this way and that way to maintain your security (because AI powered cameras may be watching), it so happens that you are bound to make a mistake and lose the key. Or else, be hacked (since you cannot fathom changing the key all the time). Like smart people must have said, meat brains are not good at holding random numbers or random sequences of words. Luke Dash Jnr, a seasoned cypherpunk, was hacked last year. He lost 200 bitcoins. Elon Musk may have lost his Bitcon keys back in '20. So, shit happens. To hard fork those lost coins back, or not. That is the question So here's the thing. We wake up and Bitcoin is seizing up. Crashing into its mass and threatening to take our financial dreams with it when it turns into a black hole of lost keys / burned coins. We also wake up and realize that the debt spiral is still sucking us down with it, even as we hodl Bitcoin. Climate is now a real issue and oh, AI is giving us headaches. Too many addictive cat videos. Too many coins are lost, the blocks are always full so confirmations take decades, the core software is too large, the fees are too high. So we sit down, like AA group members, and decide that continuing to preach financial freedom yet the currency is fast tending towards technological obsolescence, is like being high on alcohol and thinking that one is blissful for other reasons. We need to quit the 'lost coins are good for all' alcohol. In short, it will be time for a hard fork. The Hard Fork --> Bitcoin ver. 2.0 Innovation comes full circle. Innovation comes full circle. After factoring in the reality of available supply and not merely supply, we could let Satoshi Nakamoto's 2 million or so coins be our target practice and our saving grace. One shot and bull’s eye. Trillions of dollars pour down from the Bitcoin piñata. Like manna from the heavens. Right? Alas, There shall only be 4 million bitcoins and the value of lost coins, if "re-supplied" to the blockchain, will quickly deflate the value of the 4 million coins existing. Overall, lost coins would have helped the remaining coins get valuable to that point. Say $10 million per BTC. If you un-lose them by the most brute force of them all -- a hard fork -- you shock the demand economics and viola, have worth-less bitcoins than you started with. Now whoever is holding their previously un-lost bitcoins cannot be happy about that. It begs the question, what would they do? Refuse the hard fork outright. Obviously. Indeed, even if the value of the bitcoins would overall increase the market cap of the available supply, we can be damn sure it would reduce the value of each individual coin. Supply and Demand. Economics 101. The Big Question: Is this a financial revolution for the better, or for the worse? For example, let's say we had 4 million coins left. We then redeem the coins in the wallets of those proven deceased without any heir. Say Satoshi Finney is that first choice. At $10 million per coin, 4 million coins give up a market cap of 40 trillion USD. Add 2 million coins to the available supply but have the price shocked from 10 million to only 7 million. Total availability supply = 6 million. 6 million x 7 million USD = 42 trillion dollars. It is a good financial explosion. But to whom? Who gets the money?? Who makes the ultimate sacrifice of accepting to end up with less money than before? If rational and educated human beings cannot agree on simple (obvious) things like "Are fossil fuels necessary for economic progress or not?" , how can they agree on how to share this pie? "Are fossil fuels necessary for economic progress or not?" It is a financial explosion, except the majority will not want it. Satoshi may have solved the Byzantine General's problem. Somebody needs to solve the "Goodness of the community over the Goodness of the individual" problem. Of course, with my limited brains, I know most people are wary of a Marxist dystopia sliding in during this very crucial process. E.g. The coins could instead be coded to go to a handful of powerful individuals, whereas before it seemed like they would go to people who deserved a financial turnaround. Especially in the wake of what we see today with government debt ballooning, government operatives hoping to snatch some of this reclaimed BTC so as to help the government pay its gigantic debt is not an impossibility. Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place. Not the best kind of sandwich.

Is Lost Cryptocurrency Still Valuable, and Can We Reclaim It? 

Heads, I kill him. Tails — well, Tails and he not only understands who wants him dead, he will learn how little he knows of real pain. I’ll teach him, though. When I’m done, there will be nothing about it beyond his experience and there will come a moment when he breaks and begs me to finish him, prays like a supplicant to me, his Almighty, singular judge of his redemption and sole voice of forgiveness. I’ll play deaf because I’m not paid to listen. Fuck. Heads again. Goddamn it. Another boring Friday night. Three minutes of focus, three seconds to jab the guy and plunge Father Paul’s secret recipe into his ass, and then what am I supposed to do for the rest of the night? What was all the training for if I can’t make use of it? “The toss allows God to decide,” the cunning old priest would say. “Rejoice in the blessing endowed on you to be God’s Will enabled.” I don’t get it. These bastards deserved to die in the worst ways possible, but God has never let a Tails spin into my palm. It’s like He’s fucking with me, like it’s a fucking joke to Him to wind me up and then relish the frustration and disappointment when that fucking coin smiles back at me. Whatever. I’m here, he’s here and between the crowd and the music, no one will hear him scream. Might as well be in space. Hoppin’ and boppin’ through the dancers, I could be invisible for all the attention I get. He, on the other hand, exudes so much charisma that even women with partners are half-turned to watch him from the corner of their eyes. Maybe becoming a serial kidnapper-rapist-murderer wasn’t entirely a matter of choice. Maybe he’s only using the gifts God gave him, just like I’m using mine, but I doubt I’m as happy with my lot as he is — or has been — with his. No complaints on my part, though. The money’s pretty good, I travel the world in First Class and though my green Vatican City passport may not have quite the get-out-of-jail-free status of the light blue United Nations one, I don’t attract national security bureaus like they do. The moments between songs allow me to close unnoticed, my syringe ready in its sheath under my left cuff. An instant after the pulsing bass returns, I stab and then pretend to trip, moving bent over to disguise my route. No need to confirm his death, so sure am I in the evil priest’s alchemical expertise, and then my Friday night boredom is redeemed via text message — double headers are rare enough events that I would exhaust my list with less than five fingers. My mission window is short and I must first change and dispose of these clothes, so I waste no time waiting for an Uber and flag the first taxi in the rank outside the club. I have never questioned a target and I don’t now, but I can’t honestly wrap my mind around what a pubescent girl could have done to deserve me. It’s late enough she’s probably in bed, asleep, but that makes no never mind to me. Five minutes after striding through the hotel’s front entrance, having greeted the doorman and smiled at the night-shift manager, I exit by a side door dressed in running gear, my syringe nestled in my sock. The taxi ride uptown is quick, and I climb out beside a park. I limber up until the cab is out of sight and then jog without urgency towards the target address. This late, all the neighbourhood businesses I pass are closed — coffee shops, upscale boutiques, salons, even a small insurance office. Slowing as I arrive ‘home,’ I pause and stretch on the pavement out front, using my movements to gather my tools. With tired purpose, I climb the front stairs. Two breaths and I’m shutting the front door behind me in practiced silence. My mission demands less illumination, so I turn the lights off as I come to them. Keeping to the shadows, I ignore the ground floor and head upstairs. A small part of me is grateful for the wall-to-wall as I step onto the landing, but a greater part smiles at the sound of pop music emerging from an alcove. Tossing my coin as instructed, giving God the final word, my breath catches. Tails. What the fuck? Tails again. And a third time. So. Two things occur to me. I cannot torture her here and I need a way to move her somewhere safe. An image brightens in my head — the sign in the window of the insurance agent listed it was closed all weekend. It will do in a pinch. I need a suitcase. Back down the stairs, ignoring the main floor once again, because suitcases are stored in the basement. I choose the largest and retrace my steps to the girl’s room. None of the lights have been turned back on, so there is no call for collateral victims. One final check. Tails. So be it. Opening the door enough to slowly reach in and quench the main light, I use her confusion to dart across to where she lies on her stomach lost in her iPad. A rap on her temple with a folded knuckle is enough to steal her awareness, and the suitcase is ample. On a whim, I toss in her iPad. Here, then, is the riskiest part. A man in running gear does not often haul a large suitcase through the night, but once more pretending purpose suffices to protect me. Trixie Thorn would otherwise have grown into a great beauty were it not for my orders, but I tie her to the table in the staff kitchen as securely as I always do. I push a piece of torn tea towel into her mouth and secure it with tape. The one thing I don’t do is cut away her pyjamas. Nudity is a great psychological weapon but I just can’t do it. Even armed with the remaining piece of towel doused with ammonia from under the sink, I hesitate to wake her. I cannot say why. So I study her. It’s pointless, but perhaps her iPad can tell me something. Lead image by on ZSun Fu Unsplash

Heads & Tails: A Tale of Chance, Faith and Morality - Part 1

মাথা ও পুচ্ছ: সম্ভাবনা, বিশ্বাস এবং নৈতিকতার গল্প - পার্ট 1

Kopf und Zahl: Eine Geschichte von Zufall, Glauben und Moral – Teil 1

Cara y Cruz: Una historia de azar, fe y moralidad - Parte 1

Pile et Face : Une histoire de hasard, de foi et de moralité - Partie 1

हेड्स एंड टेल्स: संयोग, विश्वास और नैतिकता की कहानी - भाग 1

表と裏：偶然、信仰、道徳の物語 - パート 1

앞면과 뒷면: 우연, 신앙, 도덕에 관한 이야기 - 1부

Cara e Coroa: Uma História de Acaso, Fé e Moralidade - Parte 1

Орел и решка: История о шансе, вере и морали. Часть 1

Yazı ve Yazı: Bir Şans, İnanç ve Ahlak Hikayesi - Bölüm 1

Đầu & Đuôi: Câu chuyện về cơ hội, niềm tin và đạo đức - Phần 1

正面与反面：机遇、信仰与道德的故事（上）

This is paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 DEED license. Authors: (1) Leah Chrestien, Czech Technical University in Prague; (2) Tomá˘s Pevný, Czech Technical University in Prague, and Gen Digital, Inc.; (3) Stefan Edelkamp, Czech Technical University in Prague; (4) Antonín Komenda, Czech Technical University in Prague. Table of Links Abstract & Introduction Preliminaries Conditions on strictly optimally efficient heuristic Loss functions Related Work Experiments Conclusion and References Appendix 7 Conclusion The motivation of this paper stemmed from the observation that even the cost-to-goal, considered to be an optimal heuristic, fails to guarantee a strictly optimally efficient search. Since a large body of existing research optimizes this quantity, we are effectively lost with respect to what should be optimized. To fill this gap, we have stated the necessary and sufficient conditions guaranteeing the forward search to be strictly optimally efficient. These conditions show that the absolute value of the heuristic is not important, but that the ranking of states in the Open list is what controls the efficiency. Ranking can be optimized by minimizing the ranking loss functions, but its concrete implementation needs to correspond to a variant of the forward search. In case of mismatch, the resulting heuristic can perform poorly, which has been demonstrated when the heuristic optimized for BGFS search was used with A* search. The other benefit of ranking losses is that from the point of view of statistical learning theory, they solve a simpler problem than ubiquitous regression in estimating the cost-to-goal. We do not question the existence of a strictly optimally efficient heuristic. Given our experiments, we believe that if the space of heuristic functions over which the loss is optimized is sufficiently rich, the result will be sufficiently close to the optimal for the needs of the search. 7.1 Acknowledgements This work has been supported by project numbers 22-32620S and 22-30043S from Czech Science Foundation and OP VVV project CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000765 "Research Center for Informatics". This work has also received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Research and Innovation program under the grant agreement TUPLES No 101070149. References [1] Forest Agostinelli, Stephen McAleer, Alexander Shmakov, and Pierre Baldi. Solving the rubik’s cube with deep reinforcement learning and search. Nature Machine Intelligence, 1(8):356–363, 2019. [2] Thomas Anthony, Zheng Tian, and David Barber. Thinking fast and slow with deep learning and tree search. In Isabelle Guyon, Ulrike von Luxburg, Samy Bengio, Hanna M. Wallach, Rob Fergus, S. V. N. Vishwanathan, and Roman Garnett, editors, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30: Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2017, December 4-9, 2017, Long Beach, CA, USA, pages 5360–5370, 2017. [3] Shahab Jabbari Arfaee, Sandra Zilles, and Robert C Holte. Learning heuristic functions for large state spaces. Artificial Intelligence, 175(16-17):2075–2098, 2011. [4] Jeff Bezanson, Alan Edelman, Stefan Karpinski, and Viral B Shah. Julia: A fresh approach to numerical computing. SIAM review, 59(1):65–98, 2017. [5] Mohak Bhardwaj, Sanjiban Choudhury, and Sebastian Scherer. Learning heuristic search via imitation. In Conference on Robot Learning, pages 271–280. PMLR, 2017. [6] Blai Bonet and Héctor Geffner. Planning as heuristic search. Artificial Intelligence. 2001 Jun; 129 (1-2): 5-33., 2001. [7] Vladimir Cherkassky, Xuhui Shao, Filip M Mulier, and Vladimir N Vapnik. Model complexity control for regression using vc generalization bounds. IEEE transactions on Neural Networks, 10(5):1075–1089, 1999. [8] Leah Chrestien, Tomáš Pevný, Antonín Komenda, and Stefan Edelkamp. Heuristic search planning with deep neural network using imitation, attention and curriculum learning. In PRLIJCAI workshop, 2021. [9] Lukás Chrpa. Combining learning techniques for classical planning: Macro-operators and entanglements. In ICTAI, pages 79–86. IEEE Computer Society, 2010. [10] Rina Dechter and Judea Pearl. The optimality of A* revisited. In Michael R. Genesereth, editor, AAAI, pages 95–99. AAAI Press, 1983. [11] Edsger W. Dijkstra. A note on two problems in connexion with graphs. Numerische Mathematik, 1:269–271, 1959. [12] Stefan Edelkamp. Automated creation of pattern database search heuristics. In Model Checking and Artificial Intelligence, pages 35–50, 2006. [13] Stefan Edelkamp and Stefan Schrödl. Heuristic Search - Theory and Applications. Academic Press, 2012. [14] Ariel Felner, Uzi Zahavi, Robert Holte, Jonathan Schaeffer, Nathan Sturtevant, and Zhifu Zhang. Inconsistent heuristics in theory and practice. Artificial Intelligence, 175(9):1570–1603, 2011. [15] Dieqiao Feng, Carla P. Gomes, and Bart Selman. Solving hard AI planning instances using curriculum-driven deep reinforcement learning. In Christian Bessiere, editor, Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2020, pages 2198–2205. ijcai.org, 2020. [16] Patrick Ferber, Malte Helmert, and Jörg Hoffmann. Neural network heuristics for classical planning: A study of hyperparameter space. In ECAI, pages 2346–2353. IOS Press, 2020. [17] Santiago Franco, Álvaro Torralba, Levi H. S. Lelis, and Mike Barley. On creating complementary pattern databases. In IJCAI, pages 4302–4309, 2017. [18] Caelan Reed Garrett, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, and Tomás Lozano-Pérez. Learning to rank for synthesizing planning heuristics. page 3089–3095, 2016. [19] Edward Groshev, Aviv Tamar, Maxwell Goldstein, Siddharth Srivastava, and Pieter Abbeel. Learning generalized reactive policies using deep neural networks. 2018. [20] Arthur Guez, Théophane Weber, Ioannis Antonoglou, Karen Simonyan, Oriol Vinyals, Daan Wierstra, Rémi Munos, and David Silver. Learning to search with mctsnets. In International conference on machine learning, pages 1822–1831. PMLR, 2018. [21] Peter E Hart, Nils J Nilsson, and Bertram Raphael. A formal basis for the heuristic determination of minimum cost paths. IEEE transactions on Systems Science and Cybernetics, 4(2):100–107, 1968. [22] Patrik Haslum, Adi Botea, Malte Helmert, Blai Bonet, and Sven Koenig. Domain-independent construction of pattern database heuristics for cost-optimal planning. In AAAI, pages 1007–1012, 2007. [23] Malte Helmert and Gabriele Röger. How good is almost perfect? In AAAI, pages 944–949. AAAI Press, 2008. [24] Robert C. Holte and Sandra Zilles. On the optimal efficiency of cost-algebraic A. In The Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2019, pages 2288–2295. AAAI Press, 2019. [25] Michael Katz, Shirin Sohrabi, Horst Samulowitz, and Silvan Sievers. Delfi: Online planner selection for cost-optimal planning. IPC-9 planner abstracts, pages 57–64, 2018. [26] Diederik P Kingma and Jimmy Ba. Adam: A method for stochastic optimization. arXiv:1412.6980, 2014. [27] Donald E Knuth and Ronald W Moore. An analysis of alpha-beta pruning. Artificial intelligence, 6(4):293–326, 1975. [28] Richard E. Korf. Iterative-deepening-A*: An optimal admissible tree search. In IJCAI, pages 1034–1036. Morgan Kaufmann, 1985. [29] Richard E Korf. Macro-operators: A weak method for learning. Artificial intelligence, 26(1):35–77, 1985. [30] Šimon Mandlík, Matej Ra ˇ cinsk ˇ y, Viliam Lis ` y, and Tomáš Pevn ` y. Jsongrinder. jl: automated ` differentiable neural architecture for embedding arbitrary json data. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 23(298):1–5, 2022. [31] Drew V. McDermott. A heuristic estimator for means-ends analysis in planning. In AIPS, pages 142–149. AAAI, 1996. [32] David Ménager, Dongkyu Choi, Mark Roberts, and David W. Aha. Learning planning operators from episodic traces. In 2018 AAAI Spring Symposia. AAAI Press, 2018. [33] Ionut Moraru, Stefan Edelkamp, Santiago Franco, and Moisés Martínez. Simplifying automated pattern selection for planning with symbolic pattern databases. In KI, pages 249–263, 2019. [34] Christian Muise. Collection of pddl files of classical problems. https://github.com/AI-Planning/classical-domains, 2023. [35] XuanLong Nguyen, Martin J Wainwright, and Michael I Jordan. On surrogate loss functions and f-divergences. The Annals of Statistics, pages 876–904, 2009. [36] Laurent Orseau, Levi Lelis, Tor Lattimore, and Théophane Weber. Single-agent policy tree search with guarantees. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 31, 2018. [37] Laurent Orseau and Levi HS Lelis. Implementation of the algorithms described in "policyguided heuristic search with guarantees" by l. orseau and l. lelis, published at aaai’21. https://github.com/levilelis/h-levin, 2021. [38] Laurent Orseau and Levi HS Lelis. Policy-guided heuristic search with guarantees. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, volume 35, pages 12382–12390, 2021. [39] Arthur L Samuel. Some studies in machine learning using the game of checkers. ii—recent progress. IBM Journal of research and development, 11(6):601–617, 1967. [40] Max-Philipp B. Schrader. gym-sokoban. https://github.com/mpSchrader/gym-sokoban, 2018. [41] Jendrik Seipp, Florian Pommerening, and Malte Helmert. New optimization functions for potential heuristics. In ICAPS, 2015. [42] Jendrik Seipp and Silvan Sievers. Fast downward stone soup 2023. [43] Jendrik Seipp, Álvaro Torralba, and Jörg Hoffmann. PDDL generators. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6382173, 2022. [44] William Shen. Strips-hgn. https://github.com/williamshen-nz/STRIPS-HGN, 2021. [45] William Shen, Felipe Trevizan, and Sylvie Thiébaux. Learning domain-independent planning heuristics with hypergraph networks. In ICAPS, volume 30, pages 574–584, 2020. [46] David Silver, Julian Schrittwieser, Karen Simonyan, Ioannis Antonoglou, Aja Huang, Arthur Guez, Thomas Hubert, Lucas Baker, Matthew Lai, Adrian Bolton, et al. Mastering the game of go without human knowledge. nature, 550(7676):354–359, 2017. [47] Kristian Smith. Maze creator / solver. https://github.com/ravenkls/Maze-Generator-and Solver, 2022. [48] Gustav Sourek, Vojtech Aschenbrenner, Filip Zelezny, Steven Schockaert, and Ondrej Kuzelka. Lifted relational neural networks: Efficient learning of latent relational structures. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 62:69–100, 2018. [49] Simon Ståhlberg, Blai Bonet, and Hector Geffner. Learning general optimal policies with graph neural networks: Expressive power, transparency, and limits. In Akshat Kumar, Sylvie Thiébaux, Pradeep Varakantham, and William Yeoh, editors, Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, ICAPS 2022, Singapore (virtual), June 13-24, 2022, pages 629–637. AAAI Press, 2022. [50] Ingo Steinwart. Consistency of support vector machines and other regularized kernel classifiers. IEEE transactions on information theory, 51(1):128–142, 2005. [51] Takeshi Takahashi, He Sun, Dong Tian, and Yebin Wang. Learning heuristic functions for mobile robot path planning using deep neural networks. In ICAPS, volume 29, pages 764–772, 2019. [52] Alvaro Torralba, Vidal Alcázar, Daniel Borrajo, Peter Kissmann, and Stefan Edelkamp. SymBA*: A symbolic bidirectional A* planner. In International Planning Competition, pages 105–108, 2014. [53] Sam Toyer, Sylvie Thiébaux, Felipe Trevizan, and Lexing Xie. Asnets: Deep learning for generalised planning. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 68:1–68, 2020. [54] Vladimir Vapnik. Principles of risk minimization for learning theory. Advances in neural information processing systems, 4, 1991. [55] Marin Vlastelica, Michal Rolinek, and Georg Martius. Neuro-algorithmic policies enable fast combinatorial generalization. In International Conference on Machine Learning, pages 10575– 10585. PMLR, 2021. [56] Xuemei Wang. Learning planning operators by observation and practice. In Kristian J. Hammond, editor, AIPS, pages 335–340. AAAI, 1994. [57] Christopher Wilt and Wheeler Ruml. When does weighted A* fail? In International Symposium on Combinatorial Search, volume 3, 2012. [58] Christopher Makoto Wilt and Wheeler Ruml. Effective heuristics for suboptimal best-first search. J. Artif. Intell. Res., 57:273–306, 2016. [59] Yuehua Xu, Alan Fern, and Sungwook Yoon. Learning linear ranking functions for beam search with application to planning. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 10(7), 2009. [60] Ryo Yonetani, Tatsunori Taniai, Mohammadamin Barekatain, Mai Nishimura, and Asako Kanezaki. Path planning using neural A* search. In International Conference on Machine Learning, pages 12029–12039. PMLR, 2021. [61] Ziqi Zhang and Florian Geißer. Extending graph neural networks for generalized stochastic planning. In Bridging the Gap Between AI Planning and Reinforcement Learning. 2021. [62] Tan Zhi-Xuan. PDDL. jl: An Extensible Interpreter and Compiler Interface for Fast and Flexible AI Planning. PhD thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2022. [63] Juntang Zhuang, Tommy Tang, Yifan Ding, Sekhar C Tatikonda, Nicha Dvornek, Xenophon Papademetris, and James Duncan. Adabelief optimizer: Adapting stepsizes by the belief in observed gradients. Advances in neural information processing systems, 33:18795–18806, 2020.

Optimize Planning Heuristics to Rank, not to Estimate Cost-to-Goal: Conclusion and References

Testing the Extents of AI Empathy: A Nightmare Scenario

এআই সহানুভূতির পরিধি পরীক্ষা করা: একটি দুঃস্বপ্নের দৃশ্য

Testen des Ausmaßes der KI-Empathie: Ein Albtraumszenario

Probando el alcance de la empatía con la IA: un escenario de pesadilla

Tester l’étendue de l’empathie de l’IA : un scénario de cauchemar

एआई सहानुभूति के विस्तार का परीक्षण: एक दुःस्वप्न परिदृश्य

AI 共感の程度をテストする: 悪夢のシナリオ

AI 공감의 범위 테스트: 악몽 시나리오

Testando a extensão da empatia com IA: um cenário de pesadelo

Проверка степени эмпатии ИИ: кошмарный сценарий

Yapay Zeka Empatisinin Kapsamlarını Test Etmek: Bir Kabus Senaryosu

Kiểm tra mức độ đồng cảm của AI: Kịch bản ác mộng

测试人工智能同理心的程度：噩梦场景

Men and women have many differences, and this is even more prominent when inspecting our performance as drivers. Recent research provides a comprehensive look into how men and women fare on the roads, not just in terms of driving skills but also about safety, accident rates, and driving behaviors. A noteworthy point from the indicates that women are 13% better at parking than men, challenging the age-old stereotypes about women's driving abilities. Furthermore, women have been shown to be 12% better at multitasking behind the wheel. However, it's essential to note that multitasking while driving, regardless of gender, increases the risk of accidents and is not advisable for safe driving practices. research Statistically speaking, women emerge as safer drivers compared to men. In 2020, men were involved in 75% of fatal crashes, highlighting a significant gender disparity in driving safety. Despite this, female drivers exhibit a higher fatality rate in serious accidents than their male counterparts. Another recent shows that when in a fatal crash, a younger female occupant is approximately 20% more likely to suffer a fatal injury than a male occupant of the same age, regardless of seating position, airbag deployment, or seatbelt usage. study This is a startling statistic that warrants further investigation to understand the underlying causes. When it comes to accident rates per 100 million miles traveled, men have a crash rate of 2.1, making them 61% more likely to be involved in an accident than women, who have a crash rate of 1.3. This difference is underscored by the fact that men drive 62% more miles than women (16,000 vs. 10,000 miles annually) and account for 59% of vehicle accidents. In 2020, the division of drivers involved in all road traffic accidents was 59% male and 41% female. Moreover, male drivers were more than three times as likely to be involved in fatal car crashes compared to female drivers. Despite these figures, 2021 saw a slight majority of female licensed drivers in the U.S., with 117.6 million female licensees compared to 115.2 million male licensees. Men accounted for 73% of all traffic violations and 75% of speeding offenses based on data from 2017 to 2020. This propensity for risky behavior extends to driving under the influence, with 22% of male drivers in fatal crashes having a blood alcohol concentration of at least 0.8, compared to 16% of female motorists. Aggressive driving behaviors further differentiate male and female drivers. In 2020, 37.8% of male drivers admitted to tailgating to prevent vehicle merging, compared to 29.3% of female drivers. Similarly, a higher percentage of male drivers reported engaging in aggressive lane switching or following too closely behind another car. These statistics paint a nuanced picture of gender differences in driving, highlighting areas where women excel, such as parking and multitasking, and areas of concern, such as the higher fatality rate in serious accidents. The data also emphasize the need for continued efforts to promote safe driving practices for all, regardless of gender. Luckily, it’s 2024, and the whole point of technology is to make our lives easier – and safer. Enter artificial intelligence (AI). Can AI assist men and women in driving better? At least one shows that there is “no significant difference between male and female drivers in reaction to sudden traffic events alarmed by warning systems.” study According to the study, in terms of driving behavior, men behaved more dangerously than women. The findings also revealed that the number of crashes in critical situations was higher for female drivers. But when it comes to AI, women in the United States are more skeptical than men about some of its uses, particularly the possible widespread use of driverless passenger vehicles, according to a recent analysis of . Pew Research Center survey data Notwithstanding this skepticism, AI is expected to reduce accidents and is poised to dramatically transform driving by enhancing safety and honing driving skills. AI-powered Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) provide real-time hazard detection and intervention capabilities, such as automatic braking and lane-keeping assistance, by analyzing data from vehicle sensors and cameras. Predictive analytics extend the safety net by foreseeing vehicle maintenance issues, thereby preventing accidents caused by vehicle malfunctions. To tackle accidents caused by human factors, AI systems scrutinize driver behavior to detect distractions or signs of fatigue, prompting drivers to take necessary breaks. Additionally, AI contributes to traffic management by analyzing and predicting traffic flows and conditions, guiding drivers away from congestion and potential accident hotspots. The advent of autonomous vehicles represents a significant leap forward. These vehicles, albeit still , are guided by
AI and aim to eliminate human error— a major factor in accidents—without the
distractions or impairments humans might experience. controversial AI could actually help us improve our driving by analyzing individual driving habits and offering customized feedback and improvement strategies. This approach not only enhances driver skills but also paves the way for insurance companies to tailor policies based on actual driving behavior, incentivizing safer driving practices. Through these comprehensive capabilities, AI is on course to significantly reduce accidents and refine our own driving practices, embedding safety and efficiency into the very fabric of road travel.

Can AI Help Us Drive Better?

One might think that the very first lucky bitcoiner is quite happy these days, but the truth is that, sadly, he left us early. Harold Thomas Finney II, better known as Hal Finney, was a talented American programmer, a remarkable , and the first person to receive Bitcoin ever, from Satoshi Nakamoto himself. He was the first one to run a Bitcoin node and the first miner (besides Satoshi), while greatly helping to spot bugs and exploits in the early days of the cryptocurrency. cypherpunk He was born in California (US) in 1956 and got an engineering bachelor's degree from the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) in 1979. He didn’t always show interest in privacy and cryptography, instead starting his career in games development. He programmed several popular games for Mattel and Atari, Adventures of Tron, Armor Ambush, Astroblast, and Space Attack. including . This was the company that owned and sold the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) software created by another cypherpunk programmer, Phil Zimmerman. The open version of PGP is now the most widely used email encryption standard. Finney would stay working with them until his forced retirement in 2011, due to his Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) showing symptoms — the same rare disease the famous astrophysicist Stephen Hawking suffered from. He would later shift to privacy developments, being one of the first hires in the PGP Corporation, founded in 2002 considered Besides this career path, Finney was a dedicated cypherpunk and, along with Eric Hughes, helped to create and run the first anonymous remailer. This is a service that deletes the identifying information in emails. Then, in 2004, he would release another development very close to Bitcoin. Reusable Proof-of-Work (RPOW) In 1997, (another cypherpunk) created one of the first versions of a Proof-of-Work (PoW) system, called Hashcash. It was designed to avoid email spam by offering a small “work token” to every message. Finney was inspired by it to create its own PoW system, called Reusable Proof-of-Work ( ). Adam Back RPOW While both systems utilize Proof of Work tokens, RPOW introduced the notion of creating RSA-signed tokens in exchange for Hashcash tokens. This stands in contrast to Hashcash, where each token could only be used once before becoming invalid. These RPOW tokens could then be transferred between users and exchanged for new RPOWs at each transaction, effectively enabling reuse. In other words, RPOW could be used to create digital currencies, where it served as a method for mitigating spam, preventing denial-of-service attacks, and ensuring the authenticity of transactions. Some years before Bitcoin, RPOW presented itself as one of the first attempts to create a P2P electronic cash system. That’s likely why Finney was so interested in Bitcoin from the very beginning when Nakamoto shared his whitepaper in the cypherpunk mailing list. Bitcoin and Satoshi Nakamoto While other cypherpunks and cryptographers in the list were skeptical at first, Finney as “fascinated” with Bitcoin. So much so that he was among the first individuals to engage with Nakamoto, Finney's active involvement in the early days of Bitcoin's development underscores his contribution to its foundational phase. described himself providing feedback and assistance in debugging the Bitcoin software during its initial stages. He was the first one to run a Bitcoin node, the first miner, and the recipient of the very first Bitcoin transaction —10 BTC from Satoshi Nakamoto. Finney didn’t keep his mining for long though, leaving it “because it made my computer run hot, and the fan noise bothered me.” He expressed a bit of regret for it. However, he was able to recover his wallet when Bitcoin started to show a real market price in 2010. After that, he stayed involved in the cryptocurrency world as a programmer for as long as he could. In 2013, he was already paralyzed due to the sickness and used special software and hardware to communicate and code. In his final coding endeavors, Finney focused on enhancing the security features of Bitcoin wallets by leveraging the capabilities of modern processors designed to support "Trusted Computing." He died in 2014 due to the same disease, and his body is cryopreserved at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. His wife, Fran, still runs his social media and organizes charity events in his memory. Environmental and Privacy Concerns Despite Finney’s support of Bitcoin, there were certain things that he wanted to change in the system. He commented on Twitter (X) about it during the initial phases of this cryptocurrency. The more energy taken to mine coins the more CO2 released to the atmosphere. He wanted Bitcoin anonymity, and potentially harmful CO2 emissions from Bitcoin mining. to increase also reduce He had the foresight to bring this up in 2009 when nobody thought that Bitcoin would grow enough for this to be a problem. And now it is, indeed. According to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index ( ), Bitcoin is taking around 167.7 TWh yearly. That’s more annual energy than countries like Poland, Malaysia, or Norway consume; and 84.9 MtCO2 in annual emissions. Still much less than big industries, but more than entire countries. CBECI produces around The Next Step Sadly, Hal Finney didn’t get to see other new advancements in the crypto industry, but more eco-friendly and also anonymous networks would come over the years. One of them is , which distinguishes itself as an eco-friendly and censorship-proof crypto ecosystem primarily due to its implementation of Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) technology. Obyte Unlike blockchain-based cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which rely on energy-intensive Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanisms, This architectural choice drastically reduces energy consumption, making Obyte's network far more sustainable and environmentally friendly compared to PoW-based cryptocurrencies. Obyte operates on a DAG ledger structure that eliminates the need for mining. Furthermore, Obyte's ecosystem offers unique features that align with Hal Finney's vision for Bitcoin, particularly in terms of privacy and customization. Through its untraceable cryptocurrency, , users can conduct fully anonymous transactions, fulfilling Finney's interest in cryptographic payment schemes that prioritize privacy. Additionally, Obyte empowers users to , enabling a wide range of applications tailored to specific needs and preferences. Blackbytes create customized private tokens , positioning Obyte as a promising platform that embodies his vision for Bitcoin's evolution. This emphasis on privacy and flexibility mirrors Finney's desire to explore cryptographic solutions that enhance user autonomy and security within the digital economy Read more from series: Cypherpunks Write Code Tim May & Crypto-anarchism Wei Dai & B-money Nick Szabo & Smart Contracts Adam Back & Hashcash Eric Hughes & Remailer St Jude & Community Memory Featured Vector Image by Garry Killian / Freepik

Cypherpunks Write Code: Hal Finney, RPOW, and Bitcoin

সাইফারপাঙ্কস কোড লিখুন: হ্যাল ফিনি, RPOW এবং বিটকয়েন

Cypherpunks schreiben Code: Hal Finney, RPOW und Bitcoin

Código de escritura de Cypherpunks: Hal Finney, RPOW y Bitcoin

Cypherpunks écrit du code : Hal Finney, RPOW et Bitcoin

साइफरपंक्स कोड लिखें: हैल फिननी, आरपीओडब्ल्यू, और बिटकॉइन

サイファーパンクのコード作成: ハル・フィニー、RPOW、ビットコイン

Cypherpunks 작성 코드: Hal Finney, RPOW 및 Bitcoin

Código de gravação Cypherpunks: Hal Finney, RPOW e Bitcoin

Шифропанки пишут код: Хэл Финни, RPOW и Биткойн

Şifrepunklar Kod Yazıyor: Hal Finney, RPOW ve Bitcoin

Cypherpunks viết mã: Hal Finney, RPOW và Bitcoin

密码朋克编写代码：Hal Finney、RPOW 和比特币

If you stop and ask the average person on the street whether they think that politicians, banksters, and CEOs have their best interests at heart, you would be hard-pressed to find someone who says yes. Even the most statist, war-promoting, tax-paying, flag-waving people out there can no longer miss the obvious fact that "society" as we know it is simply a planet-sized human cattle farm, run by a small contingent of socio-/psychopaths. They probably still go along with it, and they vote for a new president or prime minister every few years, and they listen to the propaganda on the tele-screens... Depending on which half of the Duopoly party they support, there are probably different issues that they most notice: Team Red can easily see human trafficking, child mutilation, Authoritarian Socialism, and the attempted destruction of morality as a whole... While Team Blue can easily see the corporate greed, the immorality of "War," and the push for one "chosen" supreme "race" to control the whole planet... But for some reason, both sides are only capable of seeing some of these issues, specifically, they each seem to only be capable of holding awareness for the "problems" that the team they root for calls out as problems. This isn't their fault though, because this is just how the human brain works. The human experience is a hyper-personalized one, wherein our sense organs feed our brains terabytes of information every second, and our conscious mind receives a fraction of a percent of that information after it's all been filtered through currently existing beliefs, expectations, and assumptions. The human experience is, simply put, confirmation bias. The story you tell yourself in your mind is the story you will live out in the physical world. The game(s) you are playing decide what the "rules" are in your world, what "success" is, and what your relationships with others will look like... Competitive? Cooperative? Are your relationships & connections open, loving, trusting & intimate? Or simply quid-pro-quo exchanges... The Games We Play... or Don't Play Imagine you are with a group of friends, and everyone is playing a game. You notice that the rules & goals of the game tend to lead to people lying to each other, taking advantage of each other, and maybe even dehumanizing each other. Now, this is an established game, with rules that m/billions of people know. A game that has been played in more or less the exact same way for thousands of years. Do you think it's going to be possible to re-define that game? To get people to play it in a completely different way? To change what "winning" is and what acceptable behavior is to get there? Obviously, attempting to change the game being played, while it's being played, with most of the people playing it thinking that it is simply "Reality" is a non-starter. Unless you plan to dose the planet with aerosolized LSD or DMT, that sort of 90-degree turn for so many is just not going to happen. Play a Different Game - Opt Out The beautiful thing about this Reality we live in and our personalized experiences of it, is that each of us gets to choose the life we live. At any time, one can simply choose to replace an old belief, to play a different game, to tell a different story. As soon as they make that choice, the Universe begins re-aligning their life to match up to the new story. The game of Statist Capitalism is just ONE, of many many games, that we can each play every day. Every single part of the Statist structure is purely voluntary. If you don't want to play that game, you don't have to. The Exit & Build game, the Agorism game, the Off-Grid game... there are so many other options. Just choosing not to play the "banks" game, and instead using non-custodial, non-governmental, not debt-based, private currencies like Monero, or physical metals/barter, removes you from most of the games the psychopaths have set up. https://youtu.be/MDnnQt8AKNo?si=ezLeAJ-X26cborfI&embedable=true How I Opt Out I haven't had a bank account since 2009/10. Never had a credit card. Never registered to vote, much less voted. Never paid taxes. Only filed for two years when I was a student. I live out of two backpacks, and have since 2015. I have my tent, sleeping bag, sleeping pad, laptop, herbal medicine, books, journals, survival gear, sewing kit, and everything else needed besides water & food... all coming in at less than 50 pounds of equipment... You may think that means I probably live like a hobo... which is almost true in a way, but I also rent fancy houses around the world to bring friends together, help produce festivals & conferences, work with a variety of projects in the Freedom Movement, etc. I've had no money since last spring - the last of my crypto is staked away in $CULT that I won't be unstaking anytime soon... but I threw a conference called "Be Empowered" in Colorado in September, rented a retreat center in Morelia for the month of January, did a little US tour, and am currently writing on the train from Chicago to Denver, where I'm heading to host an Ethereum Denver after-party. Now, the best part of my story is that how I live now, totally free (financially, spiritually, physically) is not because I grew up wealthy, or on a commune, or anything like that... My family moved every 6-12 months when I was a kid; on top of that, I was bounced between parents more than once and kicked out of a few schools. We lived in small apartments or tiny houses until I was in high school. I struggled with suicidal depression for more than a decade, became addicted to cocaine, alcohol, and other chemicals, worked corporate jobs & general labor gigs, and was a full-time drug dealer for a good while. 12 years ago, a psychedelic experience woke me up to the fact that I didn't like the game I was living in, AND I could change it if I wanted to. It took me years of disciplined eating & sleeping, of brain-reprogramming practices, retreats, and books, and releasing everything that I thought I knew about reality (I was a physicalist reductionist atheist back then - a big part of my depression.) In Summary Basically, my message is simple. You are the AUTHORity of your own story, of your life. The only way for someone else to have authority over you is if you give it to them. At any time, you can simply take that authority back. No paperwork, no court, no battles. Just a choice to reclaim your sovereignty & personal responsibility. If you'd like to dig deeper into these concepts, I highly recommend looking into the work of folks like: Abraham-Hicks Derrick Broze James Redfield Alan Watts and so many others! Thanks for tuning in beautiful humans! You Are Beautiful
You Are Powerful
You Are Free You can find all my links at , including my Odysee channel, Twitter profile, privacy-centric crypto course, affiliate links, and much more. https://linktr.ee/palurintano

Stories, News & Mentions about ALCOA

Alcoa’s Stories on HackerNoon

Alcoa's News & Mentions