dark
Veritas vos liberabit
No bio...
User ID: 1132
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
Sidenote: I'd really wish people would move away from Medium (thanks heavens for https://scribe.rip/, which circumvents all the obnoxious crap and adds sane typographic settings) and the new kid on the block, Substack. I just saw for the first time a Substack article asking for a subscription (instead of letting me "read it now") and it just broke the cardinal highlighting rule.
Are Github/Cloudflare pages + Hugo/Jekyll/whatever's hot now that hard?
I miss the open web. *sigh*
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
9mo ago
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?
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
Seconded, this screams mind-body connection/physical symptoms of anxiety.
Obviously, it could be some super rare disease no one can diagnose. Most likely though? Psychosomatic. Get a psychiatric consult ASAP.
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.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
9mo ago
Modern architecture is mostly horrific for reasons elaborate upon a myriad times. Usually having to do with architectural schools, snobbery and that the last pre-apocalyptic generations have died.. generations ago.
Define modern. The Louvre pyramid for example, widely decried at conception, is now a architectural monument to modernism at the heart of one of the pinnacle achievements of Renaissance work. Niemayer in Brazil? Le Corbusier? Art Deco in the 30s?
You can't argue we are not decaying.
Chill with the consensus buliding.
Collapsing industries due to energy costs
This is temporary nonsense due to geopolitical machinations. Gasoline is more expensive in the US than it historically has been, but electricity has fallen almost 100% since 1900, despite machinery and tools becoming vastly more efficient (not to mention the exponential compounding of computing power for fixed energy use). CPI-adjusted electricity has continued to fall since 2000, from 0.172 to 0.159 $/kWh.
I was vaguely amused to see this pop up in the janitorial duties, this is probably one of the most eloquently written comments that's not there for 'Quality Contribution'.
That said, is there really a need for a fallacy in every sentence? The whole first paragraph is just bad blood coagulated into an ugly scab that's regurgitated ad hominem.
Next, I don't see @atokenliberal6D_4 suggesting mathematics is beautiful or a salve for diseased slums, just a counterpoint to the general narrative of decay and deterioration that permeates contemporary (and perhaps all human) rhetoric. You prop up a straw Colossus and then toss it ad populum, for them to supposedly tear apart with their physical, homeostatic hands.
As a crown of thorns for this cute little sophistical sermon, you conjure up some bizarre racial slippery slope whereby lack of aesthetic compatibility is leading to the decay of civilization.
The tone and style had me err on Bad, but after writing this up this I think it honestly deserves a warning it's so grotesquely specious.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Nice to see a visual representation of how short something is, vs the usual how much money Elon Musk has.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Whether it's a placebo or not, does it matter if it works?
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
GitHub has a half decent censorship record? They usually only fold to DMCA requests (legitimate ones at that). But open to evidence of the contrary I have missed.
Cloudflare is more of a mixed bag. I used to strongly dislike them due to captchas from TOR exit nodes and VPNs, but they have a very robust censorship record, hosting "terrorist groups" and the 8chan until boards/shareholders likely twisted so hard management had their hands completely tied. They offer DDOS protections that allow sites that would otherwise be DDOS'ed to oblivion if they were self-hosted to stay up and available. How would you say they're hostile to the open web?
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
I mean..? It was designed as a hosting service for git repositories. Sources for static websites are kept under version control anyways, is Github Pages that big of a stretch?
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.
Where the Wild Things Are; hard to imagine anything controversial here -- banned in 1963 (immediately after publication) for promoting witchcraft and supernatural events
The Giving Tree; religious and secular interpretations and adoptions abound, nothing political -- banned in a public library in Colorado 1988 for sexism
The Little Prince; maybe vaguely cynical, reflecting de Saint-Exupéry's disenchantment at the time of writing
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
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