Jakub Korab

Paul Graham has written an interesting essay where he proposes that classical philosophy has failed in its purpose because of its approach. Rather than playing mental word games hoping to come to general truths, a la Aristotle, we should start with small truths and and make them more general. Best of all anyone can do it and no one needs to know that you are a philosopher

I’m so glad that someone has finally come up with a robot that does something constructive. Now if only it didn’t keep chatting away in an annoyingly chirpy Japanese voice while it did it. I can also see a few other problems with the design, but hey, who am I to begrudge genius

Now with tounge out of cheek, every time I see something like this, I get really ticked off. Mostly because this stuff has to get disposed of at some stage, and already there are problems with consumer waste such as TVs, computers etc. Whatever about recycling it at the end of its life (I give it about two weeks before the novelty wears off - almost as long as Billy Bass the singing fish), but this stuff has a huge carbon footprint in its manufacture.

How many {dead dinosaurs|trees} does it take to pour a beer?

Stuff is a lot like food. Once we had very little, so having it was something desirable. Now we have far too much. Paul Graham has written a fantastic essay on this topic.

When I moved countries, it was with one large backpack, a suit bag and one piece of hand luggage that contained a camera, an mp3 player, my laptop and travel documents. Free yourself. Avoid stuff.

Most of the spam that hits my mailbox these days is the “Contact us urgently for your $1.5 million” type rubbish. Everything else seems to get caught by my email provider. I guess that the 419 looks like something that may be legitimate, so they let it through. Sending the mails on to email providers to shut down mailboxes is a time consuming affair and is like trying to stamp out little fires that keep spreading - it tries to cure the symptoms rather than the problem.

So what’s the underlying problem with the 419 emails? It is profitable for a guy in some third world country to scam the Unsavvy. Send out a hundred thousand emails, and the people who email you back are ripe for the picking. Now, what if the guy started getting a huge number of fake personal details that he follows up only to find that they’re crap. The cost of doing the 419 automatically goes up.

The idea: a 419 killer service. You forward the email to the killer mailbox. It works out whether it’s dealing with a legitimate 419 email, and if so adds the from and reply-to addresses to a list. It then periodically generates rubbish personal details that it forwards in an authentic looking reply message to those addresses. Now instead of having a few legitimate details, they’re hidden in the hundreds that these guys need to go through to find an actual person. The result: an increased cost of doing 419s, and hopefully getting these people to do something else with their time.