dark
Veritas vos liberabit
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User ID: 1132
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
9mo ago
Don't you just start attending Mass on Sundays and holidays/volunteering for small stuff?
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
11mo ago
Of course, don't actually quit. But start leetcoding/pulling on network strings, so if the axe does fall, you collect severance and quickly find somewhere else.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
I needed to learn and grok git when I wanted to start contributing to the linux kernel. Read the docs, the source code, and starting using it everywhere to get it into my muscle memory.
I guess when you're purposefully juggling hammers all day, you do start seeing some loose nails around the house.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
What? I keep all documents under version control, whether blog posts, journals, or source and whether collaborative or individual. It's the most robust way of preserving changes and examining them over time. Git's even used under the hood for pass, my password manager.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
It's not interesting as a proof of identity, more as an extra powerful correlation/fingerprinting attack. Consider the following scenario, you perfectly segregate two identities (separate devices, connection locations, posting times, interests) online. For some piquant, let's assume you have aboveboard beliefs/communications (posts that are kosher for your local authoritarian government) and below-board/seditious ones. Your aboveboard ones often leak your identity location, because why practice aggressive OPSEC when you're asking where's the best place to buy fresh onions near your village (even worse, aggressive OPSEC in these cases could tip off the authorities that someone buying onions around that area is up to no good!)? However, because you don't randomize your writing style, your government eventually is led to suspect that FuckTheGovernment93 is actually the same person as LocalFarmer82. You are arrested by the secret police, tortured and shipped off to a black site.
Even worse, consider a more aggressive scenario that's actually plausible in the modern age: you only have one identity that's completely distinct from your day-to-day activities. There is no other public content to compare to. However, because your government has access to your online schooling records/past essays/whatever writing you performed during mandatory schooling, they still manage to figure out FuckTheGovernment93 is you. Same outcome as above.
If your attacker is particularly skilled/motivated (or maybe this has changed with new tools, too lazy to duck it now), stylometry is also a hard to work around threat. It isn't as easy to use at scale (queries of the type: sort all users on Twitter whose writing most resembles this sample, descending, a la perceptual hashing), but if you can narrow down with communities that a person is likely to be a part of, it can be a pretty fast iterative search.
People particularly intent on segregating online identities often either take on affected styles (harder than it might seem at first, especially with 100% consistency!) or use a scrambling tool (rudimentary form of this used to be roundtripping translation).
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Passwords are hard. Pwned host computer is game over for almost everyone, barring some Qubes-type VM segregation setup. The passwords need to be entered in plaintext somehow. You can limit the extent of a breach by keeping your entire password db on an offline machine and lazily QR code'ing it across to the live machine whenever it needs a refresh. Password db encrypted with a gpg smartcard is also pretty good (though not as good as the offline setup, unless you need to tap per decryption like with a Yubikey, in which case I'd rate it as only slightly inferior).
I think you forgot the most important tip however: the more secure your setup, the higher the risk of you locking yourself out of your accounts/backups/encrypted storage. Find a way to dump your secrets in plaintext that fits your threat model (all of them, including TOTP secrets - ie, what generates your 2FA codes). This might be a box in your apartment with a backup at your office, or a safety deposit box, for instance. On the other end of the paranoid spectrum, a engraved titanium plate inside a waterproof container encased inside a block of concrete dumped in the middle of a remote lake works as well.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Consider Robert Mercer, ex-CEO of Renaissance Technologies: if not genius level intelligence, certainly 1.5-2 sigma above average: PhD at UIUC, ACM Lifetime Achievement Award...
Mercer played a key role in the campaign for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union by donating data analytics services to Nigel Farage.He has also been a major funder of organizations supporting right-wing political causes in the United States, such as Breitbart News, the now-defunct Cambridge Analytica, and Donald Trump's 2016 campaign for president. He is the principal benefactor of the Make America Number 1 super PAC.
Some of his opinions:
Mercer has said that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the landmark federal statute arising from the civil rights movement of the 1960s, was a major mistake. In 2017, David Magerman, a former Renaissance employee, alleged in a lawsuit that Mercer had said that African Americans were economically better off before the civil rights movement, that white racists no longer existed in the United States, and that the only racists remaining were black racists. Wikipedia
DDIA is the standard resource here. Read it twice, take notes.
Papers from Will Larson's Staff Engineer (ranging from DynamoDB, Raft, Paxos, GFS, etc.) are worth perusing as well (and will pop up as references from DDIA).
Signals and Threads have a few episodes that I think are particularly relevant for system design, and the entire podcast is definitely worth a listen at some point. In no particular order,
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Swapping the Engine Out of a Moving Racing Car
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State Machine Replication
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Clock synchronization
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Multicast and the markets
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Build systems
EDIT: remembered a few other fun things I had stumbled upon recently, How We Built r/Place which is a good example of a small concrete project that has non-trivial scalability requirements, as well as Google's Maglev: A Fast and Reliable Software Network Load Balancer.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Don't overcommit. Startups in most markets are gambles, people will often found 3-5 companies before successfully exiting, but if you have relevant experience, you already know this. Working 100 hour weeks for lower pay for a company that's worth 0 in 2 years won't feel good.
Roll with the punches and learn fast. You have outsize responsibility and accountability, a single (serious) mistake can be extremely costly for the entire company. It'll be harder because there's not an entire team to shift the blame around with.
Watch out for interpersonal strife. This is unfortunately fairly common in early stage startups, high stress, big egos and small teams can lead to explosive conditions. My heuristic is more than 2 months of continuous friction/misalignment and infighting is a huge red flag, and 6 is a signal that the investors/board should get involved to see if there's anything to salvage.
Learn to enjoy it. Startups aren't really the golden ticket we make them out to be (especially early stage ones). If you're not having fun, accept it and move on. There'll be other ways to make millions.
I'd like to make a meta-comment here; I got this thread in the daily volunteer janitorial duties. Without context, I see consensus building, cherry-picked (though not insufficient) evidence to support his claims -- No Chinese-Americans are not just high IQ whites seems to be the one real claim of the entire post, which the subsequent evidence feels so disconnected from I almost forgot about it --, vague weakmanning.
That said, on a quick read, and without seeing his name, it wasn't even clear to me whether he was pro or anti East Asian. The first two sections seem to suggest that the babies are a lot tougher/more stoic than Europeans, not a priori a negative trait. The last section, without context, could read as evidence of East-West cultural incompatibility or discrimination. Initially, when reading the title, I thought he was going for Chinese don't just have higher IQs, they are more resilient/industrious in general. This falls apart in the third section, where he's hammering the trope of East Asians = seen by Westerners as emotionless/cold/disconnected, which I think vaguely passes muster? There's considerable asymmetry in general cultural exports between East Asia and the US after WW2/Korea.
He's begging the question with Where are the great East Asian-American novelists?, but taking a step back, my main exposition to Japanese/Chinese culture has been self-sought (barring reading Sun Tzu when I was a young teenager, who's become a ubiquitous prototype of eternal Eastern wisdom) and entirely autochtonous. I've briefly perused top 25 best books in Asian-American literature and don't recognize a single title (except for a Murakami book, whose inclusion I find borderline offensive).
I believe I rated this as Bad, maybe an extremely charitable Neutral, but I feel this showcases a shortcoming of the hyperlocal view the volunteer system offers: not only am I unable to immediately view his previous posts (which in my opinion are significantly easier to classify without context) -- they are two clicks away, context then profile --, but am also not necessarily aware that this is a toned-down/more indirect version of the usual manifesto, for which he was already warned.
Synthesizing the psychedelics themselves, or having a chemist they know do it. TiHKAL was the classic reference on this.
Dark-web sales and purity testing labs? That meshes with the techno-libertarian side of things, but I have no idea how those labs operate and I'm guessing buying drugs online practically requires you to commit a federal crime in the US, which is a pretty big hazard.
For many of the psychedelics active in the μg range, cheap affordable lab tests (low end spectroscopy) will not be sufficient to even detect the compounds of interest. They would just say that the drug is on blotter paper, for example. Expensive analysis defies the point, and it also much more closely monitored, unless you have a friend at a university research center.
Many psychedelics have unclear scheduling around the world, and can be "legally" sold "NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION". The US has the Federal Analogue Act that catches a lot of the {1V,1P,1cP,1D}-LSD prodrugs that need to be explicitly scheduled in many other countries. So for LSD (or LSD prodrugs), in the US, I will guess that people with genuinely accurate information on doses are synthesizing it themselves. This carries much higher penalties than simple possession and could be construed as manufacturing or possession with intent to distribute. I personally would not risk the ire of the famously fickle US govermental agencies just to a slightly more accurate read on the dosage of drugs.
Addenddum: Alexander Shulgin, the author of TiHKAL, obtained a DEA Schedule I license to perform his experiments.
In 1994, two years after the publication of PIHKAL, the DEA raided his lab. The agency requested that Shulgin turn over his license for violating the license's terms, and he was fined $25,000 for possession of anonymous samples sent to him for quality testing.
So people do go indeed go around shipping samples to chemists in the US for testing, though I'm guessing for purity/lack of contaminants, not concentration.
Laws are shifting fast though, and I'd expect within a decade, you might be able, under clinical contexts, to access certain psychedelics.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
A lot of advice on both sides has been given in other threads, so I'll try to shed some light with an anecdote or two.
One of my friends dated a girl like this: sweet, caring and kind day-to-day, but became a monster when drunk. A combination of undiagnosed BPD and low tolerance for alcohol due to SSRIs led to quarterly, then monthly, then finally almost weekly blowups. She would get belligerent, messy, self-destructive, would actively fight off/try to escape from people trying to help her, it was a simple nightmare. For some people with BPD, alcohol is the perfect stimulant/depressive/uninhibitive cocktail to get them to show a really dark/animalistic side of their condition. Independent of the alcohol, it can begin manifesting in other areas of life.
Alcohol tolerance can shift wildly from person to person and from day to day, depending on food and water intake prior, rest and wakefulness, exercise, etc. People tend to find comfort in keeping up with others, because that keeps their consumption in check (they should only really get as drunk as they next guy/gal). If you're consuming more than everyone else, hard to act surprised when you get sledgehammered. I've had friends of all ages get surprised once in a while by how hard 8 to 9 drinks can hit. In an environment where alcohol consumption is ubiquitous (i.e. the West, South America, and large parts of Asia), getting a bit too drunk is inevitable. @MathiasTRex brings up a good point, the fact that her friends let her get away from them in that state is unacceptable. The number of delirious drunks that jump/fall off high ledges, or even just stumble and hit their hand and suffer permanent damage, would shock you (ask a cop/EMT from your area if you're curious).
From your post, it's not entirely clear if she falls more under the former (alcohol highlights {un,under}diagnosed condition) or the latter (sometimes can't keep up with the social drinking, and somewhat stupid/irresponsible drunk). In either case though, going forward, extra caution is definitely warranted around alcohol.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
I think your focus on teaching muddles the wider dynamic in government hiring: a significant portion of upper caliber talent isn't strongly financially motivated (this probably applies to teaching as well). In this light, all they can do is offer interesting problems (JPL/Nasa/NSA/arguably a lot of defense contractors) and/or good working conditions. Why should they try and pay 1MM salaries when Wall Street can always outbid them?
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
I'm going to disagree on several points here.
It is typically male.
Female teenagers are edgy in other ways, they'll rebel against trad parents by espousing communism, sexual promiscuity or drug/alcohol abuse, dating outside/below their socioeconomic class, etc.
It’s a typically cosmopolitan feature of following the latest trend.
Trend opposition is just as twitchy and fickle as trend following. Edginess can also express itself as disagreeing with consensus, not just aligning with it.
Many progressives certainly want to appear cool — they follow the latest trends in fashion and music — but does this desire foment any edginess?
Edginess strikes me as fractal, on a small enough scale, you're at the edge of some boundary. In hyper-woke circles, any pushback or criticism of the status quo might be considered edgy.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
11mo ago
You've captured something I've been feeling since the /r/SSC split. I've pondered and written drafts that I've discarded, because they never quite hit the nail right about what I felt had changed.
After reading this, I think you really got it. Optimism and hope are gone. That doesn't mean that verbal sparring isn't a worthwhile exercise, but the people who do genuinely see a hopeful vision for the future have mostly left (or are drowned out by the sunken masses).
Since the move from reddit, I've found myself almost exclusively posting on the WW thread.
Also mildly disappointed no one has picked up (or at least commented online about) Veritas vos liberabit, which, like Arbeit macht frei, gives me a sardonic reminder of what transpires here every time I post.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
11mo ago
Many approaches to this:
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Pharmacological: Executive function in a pill, adderall, lisdexafetamine, modafinil, pick your stimulant (poison). Congratulations, spreadsheets and doing your taxes is now fun
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CBT-esque: Stop blaming yourself for failures, understand that most people are behind on their todo lists. If it wasn't urgent yesterday, it can't be that urgent today. If it's worth doing well, it's worth half-assing (perfectionism trap). This addresses the 'feel stupid' part of your procrastination loop.
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Mind hacks/habit building: Do this slowly, but maybe make a habit of 1 task at 6PM every night. Again re: CBT, don't blame yourself if you miss a night or two because you're sick. If it takes less than a minute to do, never put it off. Etc etc.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Glad to see evidence of this (can't find any), but I think we've veered close to CW territory.
https://github.com/tbreuss/dns-blacklist-check
^ Project that uses blacklist with recent commits
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Yeah, I think we disagree on the premise (whether it's trolling or not), which then colors our view of the rest of the incident. -- Sidenote: @ZorbaTHut, any chance for troll prediction markets with a karma reward system? Or actually more generally, karma system based around correctly predicting/adjudicating moderation results (i.e., extended comment judgement requires you to slide a probability bar for each of the outcomes).
I personally hate the type of feeling based analysis that pervades forums (it feels overwhemingly X-tribe, so much more than before, halycon days, blah blah blah). I think polling (modulo polling bias) and other analytics can give much better insight into dynamic and culture progressions than any rudimentary glance over a few threads. Since this is the "Something Shiny" thread, maybe optional polling built in to themotte.org? Recurring, get a sense of trends over time. With a system like that, you can conclusively* answer questions like are Blue Tribe folk actually leaving in droves? Maybe they're actually becoming Grey/Purple/Red as they spend time here. Maybe there never were that many, and they got busy with other things in life. Maybe they're actually more common, just more moderate in tone and therefore stand out less. These datasets are now all a SQL query away. I hope the custodians use it wisely.
Zero people predicted a pandemic
A pandemic is the prototypical black swan event. If you asked people what are the odds of a largely asymptomatic highly contagious coronavirus mutation that crosses over from bats/other reservoirs or is engineered in lab spreads into a worldwide pandemic over the next 30 years, I'm sure many people would have given sensible probability estimates.
Pandemics are largely excluded under force majeure clauses, but take Wimbledon, for example, that following the SARS outbreak in 2002 bought pandemic insurance under an infectious disease clause. They paid roughly 31.7mm USD over 17 years in premiums for 142 mm USD payout. Back of the napkin math (assuming that the payout would be the same every year, i.e. Wimbledon's profits don't increase corresponding to premium increases, which of course in reality they do) suggests that the risk analysts estimated that a Covid-scale pandemic happens at most every 78 years or so. Since they probably factored in losses due to more probable minor diseases, the Covid-19 pandemic was roughly a once in a century event. This passes a cursory sniff check with the last global pandemic being the 1918 Spanish flu.
Safe to say people were thinking about, and even buying insurance against, the risk pandemics posed, so your first point is wrong.
About zero people predicted double-digit inflation (except for the usual people like Peter Schiff who make this prediction every year)
How about conditioning on the aforementioned black swan event and stipulating that US M0 practically doubled and M2 grew by about 5T USD (25% from 15T in 2020) whilst US treasury yields were kept at historic lows? The low interest low inflation free money paradigm that has dominated the past decade, under a historically axed lens, seems more like an exception than a new rule.
No one predicted Dall-E, Chat GPT, etc.
The GPT model was novel, sure, but also came out in 2018, so roughly 5 years ago. It was designed specifically to avoid the problems of supervised learning in NLP. What's surprising is perhaps how far it scaled?
EDIT: amusingly, we both forgot to reread Scott's post
If AI can generate images and even stories to a prompt, everyone will agree this is totally different from real art or storytelling.
This is basically GPT-3 and DALL-E. ChatGPT is GPT-3.5 fined-tuned with RLHF. So Scott did essentially envision this event, although maybe he didn't assign a high enough probability on it for your taste.
No one predicted Putin making a major move
This has been discussed in the other threads, but again, once faced with the question, would people really ascribe that low a probability to it? Putin and the other minds in the war rooms cannot have been aiming for a protracted land war, this is more a political decapitation with a puppet substitution gone horribly wrong. If you rephrase war to political/military intervention that aims to replace the Ukrainian head of state, the odds might climb further, and now you can just ask what are the odds of that surgical strike devolving into full-scale war. The Russians were what, 100 miles from Kiev? There is an other timeline where Zelenskyy is either dead or in exile, and Ukraine is not in rubble.
...goes to show how hard predicting is.
Sure? It's a chaotic system, and the conditional probability trees have exponential branching factors? No one is pretending to be prescient or an augur here, the exercise is just in estimating probabilities.
The "prescient" fool confidently spouts "predictions", whilst the wise man merely scribbles down a few numbers and replies, "Wanna bet on it?"
Maybe I'm too far out of the loop, but what are examples of CW books?
Flipping through my memories of childhood books, I'm getting
-- EDIT: Wow... A cursory search suggests 3/4 of these have been banned somewhere at some point in time (annotated below) so maybe I'm cruelly out of touch on this.
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Where the Wild Things Are; hard to imagine anything controversial here -- banned in 1963 (immediately after publication) for promoting witchcraft and supernatural events
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The Giving Tree; religious and secular interpretations and adoptions abound, nothing political -- banned in a public library in Colorado 1988 for sexism
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The Little Prince; maybe vaguely cynical, reflecting de Saint-Exupéry's disenchantment at the time of writing
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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; a classic written over a century and a half ago, little to be controversial here, surely? -- banned in New Hampshire for allegories of sexual fantasies
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
I feel like the poker analogy is working against you here. Try asking around a table how people would feel open jamming TT with half their life savings and years of their life on the line, whilst only getting to play 3-4 sessions (in this case, marriages prospects).
It's a numbers game. No one wants to cash at a specific tournament, or win a specific cash game. They want to come out ahead over all tournaments and games they play. You put your money in good spots and let the law of large numbers take care of the rest. And there'll will always be those unfavored by Fortuna (or Lady Variance, if you prefer), getting it in with AA vs KKs 8 times and losing every time.
If anything, I'd say slot machines are a more apt allegory, a game rigged against you unless you understand their inner workings.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Microplastics and EA (Estrogenic Activity) chemicals are somewhat orthogonal.
This paper is a decent introduction to how widespread EA chemicals are, especially when the polymer is stressed (UV, microwave, dishwasher, etc). I'd think it's fairly common knowledge not to microwave and use the dishwasher with plastic, but hey, if not, that's a low hanging lifestyle change.
Microplastics at this point are ubiquitous, and unless you're using your own filtration system (reverse osmosis or similar) that you have tested for all the water you use, you're going to have some level of exposure. What level is acceptable? Last I checked, the science hadn't really settled there, so let's wait while they make mice chug microplastic water to see if anything bad happens. My personal level of risk tolerance for microplastic lands around processed meats: unclear mechanism for harm, but if avoiding them is cheap and easy, why not?
Sorry for the facile response, but your initial question lacked details.
Are you looking for a community, or a particular discipline in which to practice your faith?
Community fishing probably has the same guidelines as usual - class, tribe, values, culture - with the caveat that Churches tend to transcend (at least a bit) class boundaries more than other social groups.
Changing Churches for religious reasons is a lot more technical, what exactly do you object to in your current liturgy?
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