Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
#209, #StandUpLocust, #MurphysFerry, Surah Yunus 10:71
User ID: 2418
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
19hr ago
Always keep the expendable chaff on the front line to soften up the enemy before the real battle starts.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
19hr ago
… If you want the player to feel awesome upon obtaining a colorful cloak or a new spell, then you don’t want everything in the world vivid and dazzling, because the novelty and pleasure of these things reduces the power of those reinforcers. If the mobs are colorful and the characters around you are all wearing awesome things, then picking up some basic “red cloak” is no longer as pleasant, and thus no longer reinforced. Pleasure from stimuli are competitive to each other. (In a boring classroom, even a black and white VHS is a good reinforcer; not so in a mall)...
I’ve had thoughts about this in real life and have come to the opposite conclusion. One thing I love looking at the buildings of North Korea for (Yeah. I know.) is their obsession with pastel colors, looking like a city full of abandoned colored marshmallows. When I walk around the parking lot of my employer and I see the same silver, white, gray, black colored cars everywhere, it really leaves things looking incredibly sterile, with the life having been sucked out of everything.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
22hr ago
I literally just told you why. It’s the physical limitations that prevent us from being able to detect them. But even suppose none of that was true, is the best thing to do if you’re an intergalactic civilization announce your existence to the rest of the galaxy? Why think that at all? It doesn’t seem to me to be the case that that would be the best approach in the first place.
Sounds like you’re just talking about Fermi’s paradox.
First of all if they were out there, how would we see them? The problem isn’t that we don’t see them but we shouldn’t even expect to. Our television and radio broadcasts don’t even reach beyond the heliosphere. It’s the sphere of charged particles at the edge of the solar system. A lot of those radio waves are just going to get annihilated, or scattered or absorbed.
Even if they did though, the inverse square law entails that the signals going to degrade substantially and so quickly that eventually it’s going to be below the standard background radiation (and therein invisible, it’ll be static; like looking at a TV). I’ve seen calculations done before that about one hundred light years is roughly the maximum distance (and this is even if you don’t take into account the cosmic dust that absorbs radio signals) it could travel theoretically. And even if you multiplied the strength of the broadcast by say two, that doesn’t increase the distance by two.
But let’s say life occurs once every thousand light years. Even in our galaxy alone, they’d be too far away for us to ever see them. Even if they’re millions of years older than us, because those signals are simply gone. Even if you had nuclear powered spaceships roving around the galaxy, they still aren’t generating anywhere near the amount of energy that starlight does. So Fermi’s paradox isn’t really a paradox for me. The best takeaway from this is to assume that intelligent life is roughly less than one per hundred light year radius. SETI researchers fully acknowledge all of this.
A highly intelligent and old civilization wouldn’t be very expansive necessarily, even with Dyson spheres in the mix. It doesn’t follow that we would expand to every spiral arm throughout the Milky Way and then move to other galaxies either. This becomes evident when you calculate the expansion rate. Is it one light year every billion years? One every thousand years?
Old civilization or not, they’d still run into the same problems as us. You have relativistic speed limits. But even apart from that, you can’t really send a massive spaceship at the speed of light, because the first particle it hits will just disintegrate. Just the random protons floating around alone will be like nuclear bombs, practicality dictates you would go slower. The propagation rate wouldn’t be near the speed of light. Even if you went 10% of that, every particle that hits that ship is going to do massive damage to it, plus you’re talking about light years of distance, and that’s not even factoring in gamma radiation… there’s way to many problems with this whole project; it just wouldn’t work.
I’ve never done the full calculations, only the quick and dirty mental math. Even if there was an advanced alien civilization say every thousand light years, the probability of seeing nothing would be close to 100%. The silence and non-observation that we see should be fully expected even if they are out there; that’s why the argument from silence fails, because it’s fully expected by the evidence.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
1d ago
If you set the threshold for success as low as a placebo then your answer is built directly into the assumptions of the argument. The standards for medical efficacy are generally much higher than that, which is why a lot of it is bunk. At the very least none of it has proved worthy of repeated scientific scrutiny and came out with flying colors on the other side.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
1d ago
Here in the US, I know people who have gotten chiropractic coverage under their own insurance.
I’ve sometimes wondered why a lot of domestic insurance programs in the US refuse to cover medical tourism operations abroad, when the expense is often much cheaper. It’s not all cosmetic that’s done elsewhere (although a lot of it is). Probably regulatory related if I had to guess. Not to speak of the logistics.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
1d ago
LibGen has been down for awhile now, and Anna’s Archive got taken down by the powers to be.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
1d ago
It’s actually kind of funny how religions practice eugenics in a way. Any system that organizes relationships that imply family formation do this.
All worldviews like this apply a selection template that involves… more or less “breeding” (if you want to call it that) for certain features. Eliezer once made a pretty funny remark in dialogue with Adam Frank that it shouldn’t be a surprise why you might find concentrations of individuals in societies today with full blown religious adaptations because until very recently, non-believers were regularly burnt at the stake.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
1d ago
It’s the secular guardian angel.
You always have to consider the contingent historical circumstances that these nations develop under because revolutions never begin as a clean slate. It happens within a context.
If you take China as a popular example, almost nobody takes into account the fact that China has always had an authoritarian / autocratic streak since its inception. When you combine its unique history with the conditions under Mao Zedong, it doesn’t require a unique ideological causal factor to explain. This is why phrases like “Socialism with Chinese characteristics,” is so well know in area studies of the region. It’s a syncretism between the two and you can’t divorce one from the other. Just like Zen Buddhism with Capitalism in Japan or Confucianism with Korea.
In the west we suppress dissenting voices as well. The spectrum of acceptable opinion within the MSM for instance is extraordinarily narrow. It isn’t narrow because someone throws you in a concentration camp. It’s narrow for other reasons. We don’t call it censorship, we call it “content moderation.” In the same way the term “propaganda” fell out of favor after the Second World War and has since been referred to as the “public relations industry.”
Bruce Schneier has also done an interesting analysis that turns politics into an analysis of information systems and in particular the structure of information flows, which are what’s important to these systems. One thing he notes is that democracies take the form of what he calls “common political knowledge,” and it details the power that transparency of information has. Authoritarian societies take common political knowledge and turn it into “contested political knowledge,” such that institutional divisions become less well understood and rules are often very fuzzy. This has several security benefits that you often see applied in IR studies, that explains why regimes will almost always favor security over prosperity whenever there is a conflict between the two.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
5d ago
For some people the fun comes from directly exploring the game itself. Why bother learning the internal knowledge of the game when you can apply your external knowledge to hack the game and become God? I’ve met people who first learned to program by implementing techniques like DLL hooking, memory inspection, process injection, etc., who basically threw their hands up and said “F this shit…,” and went to directly write to the memory address of a particular subroutine in the game; looking for ways to bypass the controls that limit your ability to easily level up and do whatever you want.
Gamification is a hard thing to get right. But the principle at play has already been known for a long time. AP chemistry in high school wouldn’t have been so hard for some people if you taught kids using black powder explosives and chemicals with energetic properties, as an example. Young boys love letting off fireworks and things that go boom boom.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
5d ago
I was always a turtling / defensive player by default, especially in the FMP maps that made it easy to macro. In all my private matches we’d orchestrate, my peers hated playing my ass because they said I played “boring.” Well yeah… When you play competitive, you play to win. If you’re looking for something casual, stick to playing in public channels with randos.
Back when we played the private ladders like Vile Gaming Tour (VGT) and StarCraftDream (SCD), things were serious and we all wanted to see the “best” players in bo3’s, bo5’s or bo7’s who could put on a fascinating show, along with all the shittalking that ensured from everyone complaining that “so-and-so plays like a faggot!,” and calling each other noobs’s and retards. I swear it was the teenage immaturity that kept the game alive longer than it otherwise would have, but it was great.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
5d ago
You and I could probably discuss this for days. My friends and I were huge into SC1 and Battle.net back in the day.
Raynor always served his role well as the go-between of sorts between the different races as well as the Terran factions. The campaign story was a lot more extensive than a lot of the competitive players originally realized, and in multiplayer especially, SC1 reproved its replay value for years and years up until SC2 came out (which I was disappointed by, even in the SK professional circuit; and I used to watch Tasteless and Artosis commentary in the Code S bracket a lot).
After the first chapter of SC2, I let the story drop off for me after that, not being too satisfied with the direction of things they went. That said, did they ever finish the chapter or cliffhanger with Lieutenant Duran and his experiments he was conducting across the stars?
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
5d ago
I’m the kind of guy that absolutely loathes customer front facing work, but I do it quite a lot, both with staff and everyone else; and they all tell me I do pretty well even though I don’t particularly enjoy it. My personality has always been more of the inward, thoughtful, mad scientist up in the high tower of the castle, thinking up crazy ideas. But the anxiety of dealing with people on the ground is almost always worse than the reality of it, and it’s a product of overthinking. The only way I’ve found to get out of that mode of thought is simply by doing the work, and you can see how out of register your anxiety is what the work that stands before you.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
5d ago
These are all things that generalize to every industry and typically fall under the rubric of “networking.” One of the most important lessons I give to those who ask me around the time they hit the labor force is “work has the exact same politics as high school.” You’ve got your kiss asses. You’ve got your dick riders. You’ve got the lazy people. And then you’ve got those who actually do the work. Figuring out a way to ingratiate yourself with whatever the in-group is, is part of the game you play in any workplace situation, and it requires you to be observant.
Be careful when it comes to being indispensable. People will inevitably take the work you do for granted in you let them and if you draw attention to yourself and become pigeonholed as “that guy,” you can turn the things that make you into a good worker into a liability that gets you into trouble.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
5d ago
Don’t underestimate the importance of soft skills and “reading the room,” still. I’ve seen competent people get passed on all the time, and usually by the idiots supervising the interns. That said, IT and infosec really is a “team sport” with a lot of interdependencies between its members.
“Standing out” is also more than simply “knowing the answer” to certain things. Having an approach that’s otherwise “custom” to who you are is something that adds great flair to your professionalism, because lots of other people beside you will have the same standard knowledge base that you do. We’ve all gone through the same courses and same certs. There’s great importance in differentiating yourself.
No, it’s regular. I can’t drink diet anything. I desire intense flavor in food and drinks. I kill on average between 4-10 bottles of regular soda a day at work, and then continue drinking cans of it outside of work, and then milk usually during dinner time and dessert.
My weight hovers between 160lbs and 170lb. I’ve eaten so much I’ve gone over 170 very slightly and then the next morning I go right back down to 165 or so; and I’m a tall man. It just felt like my metabolism would instantly crush it. But the weight doesn’t stay no matter how hard I try to gain it. I can’t stay feeling full longer than 15-30 minutes at a time usually before I feel hungry again.
Some things I just can’t eat because like I’ve said, I’ll feel anemic and fatigued the whole day. Salads are one of them. I hate salads. If I’d already eaten the meat and potatoes and everything else out of the fridge, I remember I’d go into the cupboards, dig out an unopened container of chocolate frosting, scoop all of it into a bowl, put it in the microwave and eat all of it with a spoon. Yeah, empty calories but gave me a momentary energy boost.
When my mother would go grocery shopping for our family as kids, she’d do regular grocery shopping for all of us, and then she’d do grocery shopping just for me, so we always spent more than the average family. My friends always said I had the diet of a 10 year old kid. A lot of times though I skip out on meals here and there just to stay more in line with everyone else but I’m starving inside when I do that.
… that is primarily because it’s dense in calories and humans evolved in often starving conditions. In a world of plentiful food and sedentary lifestyle we just aren’t designed for abundant sugary drinks.
My father made this point to me once. He argued back in hunter-gatherer times nature would select ‘against’ people like me from existing because I’d be the guy who ends up killing the whole tribe by starving them of all their food to satisfy my own hunger and would wind up being exiled to die in isolation. And if I survived that I’d probably end up getting killed from raiding all the neighboring tribes for their food. Thats why there isn’t many people like us. But every now and then I suppose nature as a hiccup from its evolutionary past.
I always try and have our cook at work (bless you Alvin) saturate the bun and chicken in as much butter as possible but it becomes impractical at some point, because the bun then starts breaking apart; crumbling. So he’ll put the rest into a cup that I can dip the burger in. This time though he didn’t overdo buttering the bun too much I think. I added several salt packets to the meat before putting the mayo on, then dip the bun again in butter before I take a bite.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
6d ago
I actually had a routine checkup about 8-9 months ago and all my lab values (including cholesterol) were taken. My doctor said my numbers were literally perfectly at the normal ranges. I’ve never felt unhealthy eating this way but I do feel anemic when I go off of it.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
6d ago
Just a quick snack at the moment. Lots of butter of course!.
That was before the two bags of Doritos I just ate, along with two Mountain Dews; :/.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
8d ago
They’ve got plenty of 5-point intersections where I come from, and I’m nowhere near PA.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
8d ago
The last couple years I’ve delved more into emerging markets to see what the next hot areas are going to be. Malaysia has recently caught my focus for its developing importance as a digital services hub in that particular region. Kuala Lumpur has also become an attractive destination for some people seeking greater financial freedom and investment opportunities.
Oh you’re into credit markets! I’ve studied this stuff pretty extensively and know a couple of people in high finance (one in particular who works the sell side in DCM and has gotten rich via distressed debt investing); and have a few very distant relatives in IB. The industry has changed quite a bit since the early days of the Internet. Derivatives trading in the classical sense is going the way of the dinosaur. People tell me if you’re looking to really “get into it,” beyond the horizon of an ordinary retail investor, what you really want is a job in “structuring.”
Fixed income (i.e. bonds, credits) are several orders of magnitude larger than equities markets. I’m not exactly going to pitch myself as a person chalk full of solid advice on complex investment strategies (disclaimer: I’m not a financial advisor or professional analyst), but I invest myself, and follow that side of the industry pretty closely. I’ve also been studying the equities of energy markets both international and domestic for the last few years, due to climate change trends and have discovered some pretty interesting things.
I can recommend plenty of resources your way, if you’re into that (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9).
Opening repertoire’s were always my weakness originally and it was where my deficiencies showed, but in end games I was always rock solid and had near machine optimal moves. I always preferred the Ruy-Lopez.
I was hoping to see Yagiz Kaan defeat Magnus or at least draw him, since he’s now the youngest 2700 ever to play the game; but Magnus never loses endgames. It took balls to see such a young kid so eager to swim out to the deep end of the pool. You could tell he realized the single blunder he made where it was lost for him, but I’m proud of him. Kid’s got a bright future.
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