dr_analog
razorboy
No bio...
User ID: 583
dr_analog
razorboy
1mo ago
Mm, I'll take your word for it. I'm pretty unimpressed by SQLite :P
dr_analog
razorboy
3mo ago
I was not holding it up as a loss in particular, just pointing out it's the only visible scar from all of that self-flagellation.
I don't mean to condemn people who are doing it for fun. Or securitymaxxing as art. As a cybersec person I 100% appreciate the beauty of a blog tech stack that's pure OCaml all of the way down to the (virtual) metal and have fantasies that one day we will go further and synthesize bespoke hardware from the type graphs and there's nothing black-box between your code and the net. Holy shit, so good.
I'm specifically trying to grab and shake the person who, when setting up their new phone, sees the [x] use cloud backups/sharing for safety and convenience? option and unchecks it because they believe they're so subversive or outrageous that the state (or big corporations) are looking for them and they can't afford the risk of centralizing their photos and documents. And then they go further and get to work on their GrapheneOS game and turn off push notifications because of side channel attacks and really want to live in a world where they don't get your message until they take their phone out of a faraday sleeve, get on WiFi, open Signal and have it pull messages.
This is a type of person and they're afflicted with something and I'm surrounded by them and I don't fully understand what's going on. I understand liberals and conservatives and libertarians. I can change the sliders on my values and see how my thinking can have me end up in one tribe or another. But the amount of paranoia that I'd have to add to end up in privacymaxx zone seems untenable. Surely something else is going on.
dr_analog
razorboy
4mo ago
Makes sense. Can't smoke, drink alcohol and do drugs if you're too busy exercising.
(Unless you start running with the Hash House Harriers)
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
This is basically all I seem to be hearing. Nobody knows what Israel should do (or rather: they have some sort of vague shopping list of 'hearts and minds' and 'developing Gaza'* with no idea how to make it happen in reality) but everyone apparently knows what it shouldn't do.
I basically go up to everyone condemning Israel and say "zap! you're now the PM of Israel. what's your next move?" and I generally get a range from "Israel should follow international law" (hand wave hand wave) with no specifics on how they protect their security and sovereignty doing that, all the way to something the Heath Ledger version of The Joker would say.
dr_analog
razorboy
10mo ago
Kind of a silly question: is being concerned with living a moral life a reliigous/ideological affliction that you shouldn't need to concern yourself with if you're enlightened?
Is there anything, well, "wrong" with being 100% self-interested? E.g. when you do work for mutual benefit, it's to build credit, not because you inherently care the benefit of others.
Is this nihilism? Or something else?
dr_analog
razorboy
22d ago
From a game theory POV I would think you'd want to hit back much, much harder to discourage future retaliation in the first place?
dr_analog
razorboy
25d ago
Be prepared to spend $ to keep up with the meta-game though.
Meaning, like, usual costs of socializing? Cover fees, food, etc? Or something else?
dr_analog
razorboy
1mo ago
I've had a reasonable amount of hands on time with Claude Opus, and I would rate it as indistinguishable from GPT-4 in terms of usefulness, or at least I can't tell any obvious disparities after tens of thousands of tokens of conversation.
So, if I'm only going to pay for one, ChatGPT4 or Opus, is it worth switching from ChatGPT4?
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
Fair enough, perhaps my sense of humor is too dark and absurdist. Should I delete?
dr_analog
razorboy
3mo ago
Where I live I already don't have freedom of speech or association, and the government recently froze the bank accounts of protesters whom the state-run news agency had already demonized.
Do you believe Canada is on the slippery slope towards gas chambers?
Again, how do you think anyone ends up in a gas chamber?
I've read about a couple of these situations and the best answer I can take away is: they live in a place that has gone insane.
dr_analog
razorboy
3mo ago
Yes, this completely. Smaller platforms, including things you'd use for self-hosting, are very easy to fool with (e.g.) completely forged subpoenas.
dr_analog
razorboy
3mo ago
I think it's probably worth a penny, at most?
Anyway, my research suggests these goodrx.com coupons are actually drug manufacturer rebates to the pharmacy off of their wholesale purchase. The manufacturer is effectively using this channel to quote much lower prices to uninsured poor people who would otherwise be forced to go without.
Just FWIW as someone engaged on academic work on these issues, I broadly agree with your take. That said, two quick points of disagreement -
Wow, okay, good timing. I was just about reserved to believe I was debating with 100 swords pointed at me until this falls below the fold (thanks everyone for engaging!)
What's the line of your academic work?
(1) Even supposedly friendly personalisation can be dangerous. Really effective personalised advertised can boost consumption, but if you're anything like me, you should probably be consuming less. You're like a dieter walking through a buffet restaurant filled with dishes perfectly targeted to your palate. By controlling the data held on you by third parties, you can limit how appealing the menu they offer you is. Now, of course, sometimes it will be your cheat day and you can eat to your heart's content, and having an amazing menu offered to you is positively desirable. But most of the time, having this personalised menu is going to be bad for your ability to achieve your reflectively-endorsed goals. Data privacy is one way to protect yourself from having your own most voracious instincts exploited.
Well, right from a healthy living perspective, ads that are very targeted and appealing might be a problem. But isn't it said (advocated) that "good ads" are in fact, "content"? If that premise holds, don't we already widely suffer from this problem?
(2) Privacy concerns don't seem to me to be male-coded. If anything, more of my female students are very worried about it. More than anything else, I'd say it skews continental European; Germans above anyone else seem obsessed with it. Brits are radically unconcerned about it.
I agree it makes more natural sense that women have higher privacy concerns because there's a lot pervs trying to get inside of their digital devices to exfiltrate nudes (and be otherwise generally creepy). But the level of inconvenience and fringe-ness men take on in pursuit of privacy is more extreme than what women do, in my read.
dr_analog
razorboy
3mo ago
Yes. His life is in danger. He thinks getting a gun himself will solve this problem. He probably actually needs fulltime private security, though I think he is not there yet.
He's a Bitcoin maximalist. There's not much I can do about it.
dr_analog
razorboy
3mo ago
Going to jail forces them to mostly stop being floridly actively addicted for a bit. Those few months where they can think some thoughts aside from how to get their next hit of meth/fentanyl 100% of the time is the valuable opportunity here. Jail has bad parts too: person's re-integration in society becomes harder because they have a record, and they meet a lot more criminals who can teach them to do more crime.
But, this forced sobering up might also be the only tool our society has that stops them from being a junkie destined to overdose in the near future committing crime the whole way.
dr_analog
razorboy
4mo ago
If you lived in the 1600s and were totally fine with slavery, what non-emotional appeals could someone make to sway you against slavery?
I'm just about finished with a bulk phase and now doing a cut phase. That is, dieting.
My problem with dieting is that the person who decides to begin the diet., me, can be overruled by the future me through non-compliance. I cannot make decisions that bind my future self.
If I get a DEXA scan done, and weigh myself, and have blood test and take BP measurements, that puts me into a mode to really focus on my health. The problem is after a few months of it the dread sets in and I avoid weighing myself. Or I stop logging my calories. Some time has gone by and I don't want to see my BP anymore.
Biomarkers are great for me for motivation, but they rely on me to get them done, and sometimes I run out of motivation to have them done.
One idea I had writing this: when I get my DEXA scan done, immediately schedule the next one for 3 months out. There's probably not much health utility to getting them done so frequently, but I imagine it would be super annoying to pay for one and see fat gain. Looming persistent motivator.
Anything else along these lines? I could imagine a boutique health app leveraging similar persistent motivator things like this.
Alternatively, can I create a personal psycho-social environment that puts extreme pressure on me to strive for low body fat? You know, like what the Japanese have going for them.
dr_analog
razorboy
4mo ago
As per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_House_Harriers
The Hash is humorously known as A Drinking Club With A Running Problem, with the preferred beverage of consumption being beer.
But I just meant that if you gave the population 30-60 minutes of busywork a day, like exercise, that made it really hard to do self-destructive things like drugs, drinking or smoking at the same time, that might be a significant health gain even if there was no direct benefit from the exercise itself.
dr_analog
razorboy
4mo ago
One thing that I don't understand how to deal with is
Alcohol use was based on average alcohol consumption (g/day) in 1981 of beer, wine and spirits[25] and classified as never, former, occasional (>0.1 and <1.3 g), low (≥1.3 and <25 g), medium (≥25 and <45 g), high (≥45 and <65 g) and very high (≥65 g)[26].
Body mass index (BMI) (kg/m2) was calculated based on self-reported height and weight in 1981. BMI based on self-reports has been shown to agree well with BMI based on measured values[23].
They assessed these in 1981 and maybe tried to control for them? But the study ran through 2020? Why only check these once? What's the impact either way? I flip between "maybe this doesn't matter at all" and "doesn't this render the study findings highly suspect enough that you should feel bad for submitting it for print at all?"
dr_analog
razorboy
4mo ago
Can someone summarize right-wing contempt for Israel for me? Is it something like
- Jews, believing they were oppressed minorities, were woke or woke adjacent
- Israel famously refuses Palestinian settlement in their country but urges others to take refugees including Arab refugees, some of whom end up being terrorists
- Israel gets attacked by Arab terrorists
- Jews discover that the woke consider them oppressor colonialists
- Israel apologists make “might = right” and “actually, multiculturalism bad” arguments
- conservatives now point and Nelson laugh “ha! ha!” at the irony and hypocrisy?
Do I have this right?
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
I was thinking buy condos in Florida like millions of Jews before them?
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
That is kind of my question yes. Does the solution require a leader that’s sane and visionary enough to want peace and prosperity with cosmopolitan sensibilities while at the same time is capable of doing violence to his own people to avoid any violence coming to Israel and ruining the plan. And keeping this up for decades.
Business owners already suspect this and want to act on this. We call this behavior racist. Why would the general acceptance of race-IQ change this dynamic?
That is, racism doesn't necessarily stop being racism just because some of the stereotypes are true.
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