dr_analog
razorboy
No bio...
User ID: 583
Why can't the production studio be looking at the demographics of the customer base and decide that hey some %age of our customers are black, and so they may relate to the story better and spend money on it if we include more/any black characters?
I've barely read LOTR but unless whiteness was a critical part of the story it seems fine to change skin color. It's a movie about, like, whole different species of humanoids right? Different skin colors should be well within bounds?
I agree a lot of productions feel like they're bending over backwards to include more races and it comes off as cheap and woke fearing (see: children's books), but the more basic business case seems valid too.
EDIT: I've not seen the show nor have I read the books and I mostly watched the original movies with 'drinking game' style interest, so pardon my ignorance. I see from the responses that the sprinkling of racial diversity is done in a clearly cheap and ham-fisted way. Thank you to everyone who took my question seriously.
I have a lot of sympathy (or maybe pity) for SBF. "Stole client funds" appears to have solidified as a meme much the same way "crossed state lines" had in the Rittenhouse case.
I think it's hard for people, including technologists who haven't worked as quants, to appreciate the level of technology risk that's present in quant trading. In most of tech your biggest risk is having all of your data destroyed, and you can address that with well worn improvements in backups. You also risk being hacked but those breaches tend to be embarrassing rather than company ending. Even Sony, which was pwned as hard as you could possibly be pwned, ultimately recovered. But an additional risk in quant trading is accidentally and irrecoverably giving all of your assets away in a few seconds.
Even companies that are following all of the rules and have the right number of members of the professional management class in their ranks can destroy themselves in a matter of minutes. Knight Capital Group destroyed itself in 30 minutes by (with some creative license) failing to follow heroic practices around retiring old flags in protobufs.
Alameda/FTX had a culture that resembled "move fast and break things". They grew extremely quickly. I'm highly skeptical they were able to stand up robust accounting and practices to mitigate technology risks in so short a time.
When SBF says he didn't realize they were leveraged due to accounting error, I believe him. It's not like you can just install the QuickBooks Enterprise Crypto Derivatives Exchange plugin. All of this stuff was bespoke, and in a hurry.
When you thought you had $30b in assets and minimal liabilities, you can spend a billion or two on indulgences, charitable giving and campaign contributions. Your can say confidently you're not investing client funds. If those assets are suddenly marked down 90% you look like a fraud and you're in deep shit.
That's the nature of the business and he knew the risks. But probably in hindsight I'm sure he wishes he had been even more careful.
This isn't to say that I believe he definitely didn't commit fraud. Rather this is me saying that as someone who has pushed code that I thought accidentally gave away $10 million of my employer's money (the gigantic exhale of relief came when we learned I failed to scale by 1000x in the reporting and not the ordering), I am defaulting to blaming it on stupidity before malice.
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
Not all privacy desires have their foundations in criminality and kiddy porn. Villainizing E2E encryption and truly private spaces as exclusively the domains of ne'er do wells is the exact same tactic people use against guns to win the culture war. Carrying a pistol doesn't make you a paranoid asshole; it means you're vastly more prepared for a rare occurrence than someone who doesn't.
Just to be clear, as I mentioned elsewhere, I'm not villainizing people for using E2E encryption. Just pointing out that E2E encryption is an absolute gift to villains while everyone else using it LARPs as an enemy of the state.
As someone who has guns himself, my view is
- it would be best if society had no guns in it
- but our society has guns
- criminals exist and are incentivized to crime
- police cannot stop them from doing crime fast enough
- therefore, I should have guns myself
Perhaps if police response time in my town was 90 seconds and not 20 minutes the economics of crime would change, but it's not so I need a gun.
Anyway, I agree given the circumstances handgun ownership makes sense. Is the claim for E2E messaging even this solid?
I want to be able to talk about the government without them listening. I want to be able to talk about psychotic leftists without them getting me fired, and I want to watch exotic pornography without pyschotic rightists getting me fired. I don't trust any convenient megacorp to safeguard me from any of these actors or themselves.
I don't quite follow. You want to be able to do this stuff under your real name without every adversary finding you? Or... you want to be able to do this via an anon handle without being easy to doxx?
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
If anything, working at Google actually made me a lot more confident about their PII protections. They take it extremely seriously and I'm actually surprised so many people were able to abuse it, though it's to be expected at their scale: Google has 175,000 employees and maintains billions of accounts.
To me, this is the exception that proves the rule: you're safer with Google.
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
I brought up the wholesale surveillance concern here https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/183482?context=8#context
It's not a complete response to your comment though.
The number of people that government spy agencies can harass is much more scalable. The Canadian truckers had their bank accounts frozen less than 2 years ago! We need digital privacy so that a government bureaucrat can't change a 1 to a 0 and lock a million dissidents from their bank accounts.
Scalable harassment is worrying, though I don't see how this is a function of privacy really? Like how would you solve the de-banking problem? Is the problem that it was too easy for the government to figure out who all of the protestors were and then work backwards to find their financial accounts and lock them down?
On the other hand, let's say I had cryptocurrency on my computer. (I don't, by the way). I would take extreme measures to keep this secure because everyone in the whole world could potentially steal my coins.
Irony of ironies, the extremely technically competent anarchist friend who had his self-hosted personal email hacked was because the attacker was an organized criminal who knew he had millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency. The level of sophistication deployed by the attacker was astounding, which included producing faked search warrants. The attacker also already somehow had copies of his driver's license and we have no idea how he got it. They were not successful in stealing his Bitcoin but they came very close and this criminal continues to pop up in his life from time to time using information he gathered.
See also that a Bitcoin core developer was hacked recently https://www.theblock.co/post/198688/bitcoin-developer-pgp-exploit
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
In the non digital world there are a lot more checks and balances. Getting a warrant to search a home is one thing, mass surveillance on millions of users is another. What is happening online is more like the police obtaining a search warrant for every building in a city and sending a robot with drug sniffing capacity into every room in the city. The police may follow a specific suspect around, while the state in many countries forces ISPs to keep a record of all visited websites for millions of people. Governments want to snoop mass amounts of data on cloud servers but don't have the right to routinely search hotel rooms or offices spaces. Why should data on the cloud be less protected than a letter laying on a desk in a hotel? Why can't digital services be as private as a taxi service? If I rent an uber the police can't set up a roadblock and search all documents in every car. So why can they do that for email?
In the olden days we used to argue that mass surveillance was actually useless because it generated far too much data and even detection systems with very low false positive rates still created an unworkably huge number of events that had to be manually reviewed.
I haven't seen anything that has changed the story on this, except in CSAM which is so radioactive that law enforcers have successfully pushed the burden onto companies to surveil and report them. There's been some criticism of the false positives here https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html but so far this doesn't seem like a huge problem. And again only something like CSAM appears to rise to this standard, for now.
To be clear, I still think police should have warrants to do stuff.
As for GDPR it did make a big difference. In my career as a developer I hear the acronym GDPR on a regular basis, and it has forced companies to be far more careful in how they store and handle data. GDPR put a lot of pressure on companies to think before they acted and made the non-tech portion of companies much more interested in data security. Thanks to GDPR I have had non tech boomers with a business background send long emails asking about how we encrypt data, TLS, when data is deleted and other issues that they never thought about 10 years ago.
I thought the Snowden leaks, specifically the revelation that the NSA was able to re-construct GMail inboxes without a warrant because they had tapped replication events on private lines between Google's datacenters, compelled an industry-wide effort to take security a lot more seriously, including TLS everywhere by default. Also it timed well with the fact that CPUs were now fast enough that encrypting by default didn't add an unacceptable burden. I'd be curious to see how the GDPR specifically made a difference here since it coincided with these two other events.
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
This is implicitly misrepresenting the actual situation. Searching your home dungeon takes a warrant; searching your digital asserts (held by third parties) for self-produced child-pornography or other state-disapproved things requires a subpoena at best and may simply be blanket done on everything by some sort of automated system.
Oh, sorry, I meant to say end-to-end encrypted messaging up there. Fixed. That's private to only the sender and recipient and even a warrant can't compel discovery if both sides destroy their copies .
The steelmanned case is "Trump 2024 The Return - Make Liberals Cry Again" (bumper sticker). Obviously Trump is a greedy unprincipled narcissistic hypocrite who hasn't delivered on anything really, but he sure does drive the sanctimonious liberal elites insane in a way that no other Republican can. Plus he's pretty entertaining, at times.
Much more exciting than a generic Republican. I don't know if there are more redeeming qualities than this.
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
On the other hand, Native American peoples (including, say, Mexicans?) have an ancestral claim to North America that goes back many thousands of years. Perhaps hundreds of thousands while USians barely have any by contrast.
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
Fair enough. Eliot Spitzer got brought down because his bank transfers to a brothel were red flagged, they investigated, and they just happened to nail the governor of NY. Obviously what really happened is they brought up all of Eliot Spitzer's records, went over it with a magnifying glass, pieced together the brothel thing, and also noticed it had been red flagged (like a billion other transactions that are never looked at), and worked backwards from there to construct a story where they had cause.
So that's an extreme case. How often does this happen in practice though? Also, even in my extreme case, it doesn't seem actually wrong for this information to have come out about Eliot Spitzer?
Oh, actually, people also seem to drastically overvalue what their private data is worth.
Anecdotally: So, I don't have health insurance (I have wealth insurance instead, for catastrophes and it can't call itself insurance). So, I pay the retail rate for drugs. But it turns out there's a whole bizarro world economy where you can go to goodrx.com and get insane discounts off of the list price, like 90% or more and the drug ends up costing less than it would with an insurance copay.
Anyway, I have no idea how this works. I asked the pharmacist once why this free coupon knocked $10 off of this totally mundane drug that millions of people take. Her knee-jerk reaction was "because they sell your data". She really thought the fact that I take this med + my email address is worth $10 to someone. Not just that one time, but every time I refill it.
So, extrapolating "taking something that's yours" and "$10+ per take", I could see a recipe for widespread driving people crazy about privacy.
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
No, and that you think so just means you do not accept their terminal values. Whether those terminal values are ipso facto insane can't be decided from the fact that they have homicidal opponents with conflicting terminal values.
Yes I suppose am rejecting religious devotion to a piece of land as a terminal value when there is abundance of land on Earth that’s far less problematic. I consider this sub-sane.
This is independent from why the homicidal opponents want it, IMO.
Is it wrong to demand that Israelis relocate to Florida? It’s not like they can’t move all of their holy buildings. Surely the terra itself isn’t sacred?
Of course the land is sacred to them.
/tableflip
Ok, so...
Isn't this the Israelis falling a bit below the sanity waterline? Yes it's true they're surrounded on all sides by people who are so toxic that they would rather die than coexist with Israelis, or even just share a border with them, and yes these other people are behaving really, really badly. But given that Israel is not allowed to solve this the old fashioned way (genocide), and all avenues for peace have epsilon probability of success, ... shouldn't they just nope out?
I agree it sets a terrible precedent that your neighbors can get their way just by succumbing to a deep and apparently permanent craze, and ideally you'd like to prevail against them, but at some point shouldn't you just move to a better neighborhood? Unlike the Palestinians, there are other nations of the world that would welcome them.
Israelis seem destined to be in this fight for centuries, and they're apparently okay with it.
dr_analog
razorboy
7mo ago
My default now is to assume the FBI is actually extremely incompetent. Therefore, if they proceeded to charge this guy, they would've had to reveal some embarrassing mistake made in investigating him so they're choosing to instead let him off with a wrist slap.
dr_analog
razorboy
1yr ago
Damning with faint praise. They failed to do the basic tasks of their entire purpose. They won a stupid prize from a stupid game.
This is the part that's sympathetic pitiful to me. Starting a business and failing at it badly enough that you lose customer money is just sad.
It's stupid, but not criminal. Unless you think criminally stupid is a thing.
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
Let me present you an alternate vision of dystopia.
https://www.themotte.org/post/479/calling-all-lurkers-share-your-dreams/94878?context=8#context
We've been pretty fortunate that everyone that has built darknet markets (DNMs) so far are not competent or visionary enough to produce something high quality. The potential black market has not come anywhere close to being fully actualized.
The maximally dystopian horror example case is: onlyfans for live streamed child rape / snuff films with tens of thousands of men watching from behind Guy Fawkes masks beating off and tipping tens of thousands of dollars an hour. Everyone involved, the viewers and performers, completely anonymous and untraceable.
Yes, I am very familiar with the usual cypherpunk arguments for why crypto is an important tool for protecting people's security/privacy from criminals, and that also you can't trust police to protect backdoors in crypto systems and to also not abuse them. I'm not convinced the endgame world of maximally "useful" DNMs that could be produced wouldn't be a net worse world overall.
Seems like cryptocurrency is waning a bit so this future may be delayed for now.
Perhaps my view on this is informed by being very close to the production of the tools that could create this dystopia, but the creation of a completely lawless criminal state that law enforcement is permanently locked out of meeting technocapitalist incentives is a possibility that is too casually dismissed.
There's still a lot of room for an underworld Jeff Bezos to pick up a trillion dollars.
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.
Is this whole line of moral questioning useful? I consider it a given that the civilness is based on security, safety, abundance, lawfulness, peace and so on. Teasing out religious and cultural differences is a little interesting, though I think misses the point. It's fairly universal that stripping away these civilization cornernstones make people more savage.
The more interesting question is, is it ever possible for a 21st century civilization to collide with a 14th century one and for the 14th century one to be warmly embraced and adapted? And I say 14th century because I consider the currently problematic Islamic cultures of the world to be basically the Spanish inquisition with the sign flipped from Christian to Islam.
For a more extreme example, my mind immediately goes to European settlers meeting the already-here indigenous peoples of America. Despite the billions of words written about how harmoniously they must have existed in connection with the Earth and one another, I'm sure they were probably even more insane to deal with than the currently situated Hamas.
(Of course the native Americans didn't have adversaries of the European settlers hooking them up with modern assault weapons)
dr_analog
razorboy
1yr ago
From a survival of the fittest perspective you convinced me cancel culture is actually good.
Not entirely sure that I'm kidding?
dr_analog
razorboy
1yr ago
One downstream consequence of that is that I commit to attending Parent-Teacher conferences so as not to seem negligent.
While we're confessing to pro-forma parental activities... my kid's difficult-to-get-into, otherwise lovely preschool had a parents workshop over the weekend recently about talking to your kids about racism. I felt obligated to go so that they wouldn't think I was some kind of person who merely believes in color blindness. I made sure to bring up a traumatic bigotry-related thing from my childhood that had to do with honor violence, with a vow to not let my kid grow up in a world like that. I even almost shed a tear.
I think I'm safe, for a little while.
I don't think @dr_analog thinks that's a problem.
To be clear, I think police abuses are bad. I consider that a problem. I don't think it's unsolvable or that it is destruction of security. At least not moreso than any other rights. I don't think someone would say the security around your property rights don't exist or are destructed because a police officer can theoretically steal your property and tell you to suck it.
By "We just got through a period where enormous sums were invested in web 3.0 crypto-systems with outlandish ultra complicated architectures for everything from micropayments to whole network states (etc) and it was all pursued with doe eyed zeal" I mean that it's absolutely possible to construct a system where law enforcement has keys to unlock crypto with some semblance of due process. The problem previously is that it's been done so secretively (since the community response is so outraged) that nothing with a sound design has been produced.
I cant stress this enough; the cypherpunk community warned us at length of how impossible it would be to prevent abuses if you give law enforcement a backdoor and then during web 3.0 cheerfully advanced pitch decks for protocol research labs for moving all social media to blockchain, tracking and enforcing all property rights either through blockchain or DAOs, doing anonymous voting, insurance, exchanges and a hundred other libertarian fantasy replacements for the state that balajis could generate.
Take their hysteria about police backdoors with a grain of salt.
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo 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
2mo ago
Might still happen! (I didn't want to explain why I think crypto is dumb in my top-post)
dr_analog
razorboy
5mo ago
Not /u/Lizzardspawn, but that's basically what it boils down to. Until the IDF restores something like a 21st century notion of civilized order, helping Palestinians is nearly impossible.
I'm currently working as a cybersecurity engineer and I'm a former Google SRE. So, I request you do not kneejerk dismiss me as some kind of technical ignoramus if you think that's what my argument hinges on.
Whenever privacy warriors complain about privacy I find myself rolling my eyes and thinking okay boomer. Even though more people than boomers say this and I do believe privacy is important. To be clear I mean privacy in the abstract. "I don't use Facebook because [privacy]". "I am looking to adopt a GrapheneOS based phone with no Google apps because [privacy]".
Privacy is obviously important. I don't want some rando, or worse, some personal enemy to rifle through my all of my digital data looking for ways to harm me. But the abstract privacy concern takes the form of a Motte and Bailey between the two. Google, Facebook and friends mostly act on your private data in the aggregate, but the privacy advocates generate worry that your intimate conversations or pictures are being personally viewed.
I also find privacy warrior claims rather, lets say, Joker-level anarchistic about rule of law. Everyone should have end-to-end encrypted messaging and the government should be locked out of private spaces no matter what. In no other domain do we accept a claim like "this dungeon in my house is off limits even to detectives with a court order because it is my private property" but apparently yes this digital cache of self-produced child pornography or evidence of a ticking time bomb terrorist plot[1] is something we can take to our graves regardless of any legitimate pursuit of justice. The level of hostility towards government here surpasses any of government's responsibility to protect its citizenry.
I'm not arguing against having digital security. It's very important for both organizations and individuals to have basic opsec lined up, especially because of how many automated and directed attacks there are trying to steal money and secrets. But in this battle companies like Google, who privacy advocates possibly fear only less than Facebook, are far closer to friend than foe because they provide a level of sophisticated and free security and direct privacy guarantee that almost nobody can achieve on their own.
The level of fear and worry privacy warriors generate rises to the level of conspiracy-adjacence. The word "qanon" pops into my head. Someone, Out There, is collecting all of your private information and you need to disconnect from the grid right now. Abandon all petty conveniences like being able to share photos with grandma, your life depends on it.
Ironically, the self-hosted Trust No One approach appears to make people even more vulnerable to attack. Even very technically sophisticated friends of mine who have hosted their own email have been hacked and their identities stolen (and used against them for extortion) in ways that would not have happened if they had stuck to GMail and used their FIDO2 two factor key for second factor.
I have another friend who decided to take his family's photos and files out of iCloud and Google Drive. He set up a home RAID array and was cruising along fine but neglected to monitor the drives. One failed and he didn't know, so when the second failed all of his data was gone. He didn't have backups, because why would you if you have RAID and snapshotting. He's not some noob either. He is also a sophisticated technology professional.
My argument against individual actions you can take on privacy are something like: you can do a few basic things to radically improve your personal opsec, and anything else is rapidly diminishing returns at increasingly greater inconvenience and, worse, may be a net increase in your vulnerability to attack or data loss.
My argument against regulatory action on this is, well: Europe leads the way on this. Does anyone think, say, GDPR has made Europeans much safer than Americans? At what regulatory and compliance cost? Mostly GDPR seems like a joke.
The fact that privacy fretting appears to primarily afflict men (with notable exceptions like Naomi Brockwell) suggests that there must be something autistic about it.
(Mostly, I can't shake the strange feeling that inside of all of this is a The Last Psychiatrist style phenomena (made with impeccable erudition that I could never live up to) that privacy worries are a proxy for dealing with some... thing(?) that people would never allow themselves to acknowledge consciously)
In the end, excessively fretting about privacy mostly is costly (in time), increases inconvenience and annoyance, increases the nanny/regulatory state, puts you at greater risk, and just makes the ads being served to you dumber.
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