Yes, "burns you out" is exactly right. These communities all start off good and happy, and once you've answered the same question 100 times, you can't do it anymore, or you're just a jerk about it. I'm not much of a contributor on StackOverflow, but I have written some open source software and people email me to ask questions. I don't mind people asking me questions in general, but much more than half either didn't read the step-by-step instructions, or didn't do a cursory Google search, and some even ask you to do their job/homework for them, and you get tired of it after a while.
I've used StackOverflow since it was created. It's definitely hostile to people who don't do any amount of effort before posting a question (maybe that's newcomers?) You can't be a contributor on that site for long without getting frustrated at seeing people post homework questions again-and-again. It's even fairly hostile to people who do their own research before posting - if you can't figure something out and you post your question you'll definitely get a "you're doing it wrong" answer, and you'll often get an, "if you'd architected your software completely differently you'd never even have a problem like this" kind of answer.
However, I've never seen racist or sexist content there. Ever. Where did that data come from?
Maybe, but I also bought a made-in-the-USA shovel on Amazon, with prime two-day shipping. It was a specialty kind of shovel (wanted a trenching shovel with a long handle) and I couldn't find it in any local big-box stores (they only had short-handle variants). I never thought I'd buy a shovel online.
I don't use the video service - it didn't seem to have much that interested me. On the other hand, I regularly find stuff to buy that's less expensive than the store (even basic household items) that I regularly just order it from my phone when I realize I'm almost out. It arrives 2 days later. Even if it were the same price it'd be more convenient that I don't have to go to the store for one item, but it's almost always cheaper!
Also, many things that are $10 or $20 on Amazon or e-bay are $3.25 from AliExpress, free shipping, if you're willing to wait 6-8 weeks.
If it was public, there'd be enough people complaining about it to change it (here anyway). My point is that it's the fact that I don't even know how many points I have, and I try to get on a plane and can't - that's so much worse.
We have "demerit" points on our drivers license here in Ontario. As long as the system is transparent (you broke this law, -25 points, you paid your tax on time, +2 points, etc.) then it's not so bad. Post the account history publicly for each person. However, if the algorithm is a secret, that's a really big problem. You know all the Supreme Leader's buddies are going to have padded scores, right...
It definitely sounded like bad management. She blamed someone else for messing up the accounting, but ultimately she's responsible. If you don't have a "buck stops here" attitude, then maybe management's the wrong place for you. She talks about picking battles but it seems to me that fighting workplace bullying is a good battle to pick. It could have gone like this, "Here's the workplace harassment policy," and then two weeks later, "you've violated the workplace harassment policy 3 times, getting a verbal and written notice one your first and second violation. You are now being sent home without pay...". Fourth infringement is termination with cause. (I realize that won't hold up in court, so you still have to pay termination pay, but it's always worth getting rid of problem employees.)
It's already "hacked" by a voyeur: Amazon! There was an article last year about the Roomba (or Neato?) CEO saying he wanted to collect information about the inside of your home and sell it. This Amazon stuff (Alexa, robot) is exactly for this purpose. Forget that.
Saying that crocodilians are generally considered descended from dinosaurs doesn't seem to be correct. See here for instance. Crocodilians and dinosaurs are both archosaurs, sharing a common ancestor. Birds are descended from the dinosaurs, likely
I wonder if birds can taste the toxins then, since they're descended from dinosaurs and survived, though apparently at their worst they were down to a fairly small population on a remote island somewhere. (Can't remember where I read that...)
This is one of those cases where a bunch of citizen scientists could easily perform a whole bunch of repeatable experiments and publish the results and we could know with quite a bit of certainty if this was happening or not. As it stands, people are being lazy about it.
There's a difference between advertising-supported businesses of old, like newspapers and television commercials, and what we have now which is selling the data more than selling the eyeballs.
One of the outstanding questions was, "what do you do with all the excavated material?" Turns out he intends to make them into bricks (consider the description - life size, holes through the middle, withstand an earthquake) and sell them. Yes, bricks are lego-like. So it's not that crazy. He's just hoping to turn the excavated material into a building product.
I'm a bit shocked that it's such a big story now, but I realize most people still weren't thinking about the fact that they were the product with this scheme. Even now, you don't trust Facebook but you trust Google? That's crazy to me, but the typical response of most people is to love the new shiny, and once you've made that choice, you'll tell yourself any convenient story to keep that illusion alive, until you're faced with overwhelming evidence like this.
Thanks for the informative post. You're right that it's the ability of someone to publicly post the information needed to decrypt their messages that breaks the system, whether that's a broadcast public key, or their own private key, or a seed. As soon as that information becomes public, you allow griefing. The point was to foil metadata collection, but I honestly think there's probably better ways to go about it. BitMessage is interesting as an example of what doesn't really work.
My memory is a bit funny, but I don't think there's anything that prevents you from encrypting with your private key. In fact, I believe signing is just creating a hash of the message and then encrypting the hash with your private key. As the receiver, I computer the hash on the message, then decrypt the signature with your public key and validate it matches the hash I calculated. However in this case I believe they were encrypting the entire message with the private key. Again, it's been a while.
For a moment a few years ago I was interested in some kind of crypto messaging system loosely based on the concept of BitTorrent (I forget the name, like BitMessage or something) but your PC, acting as a node, basically got a copy of every message, encrypted, and your client could only decrypt the messages that were encrypted with your public key, so you could only read your mail. So far so good... if your PC had a copy of a message with illegal material in it, you'd have plausible deniability - there's no way you could read it without the recipient's key so no (sane) court would convict you for possession.
The problem is the system also supported broadcast messages. So I could write a message encrypted with my private key, and everyone who had my public key could decrypt it. It offers a way of authenticating that a certain person sent a message. The problem is, now I've potentially got illegal content on my PC and since the key to decrypt it is public, I can no longer claim I can't read it. Any forensic group could grab my PC and "prove" that it had illegal content on it very easily. In fact, it allows someone to plant easily provable illegal content on everyone's PC. Bad idea.
I brought up this issue, but nobody on the forums took it seriously. I gave up on the whole idea after that. Seems to me the idea of allowing random text into the blockchain is an obviously bad idea. I didn't even realize that was possible.
If you are thinking about lists with due dates then you're already in trouble. The best method I've found over many years is the Getting Things Done (GTD) method, though you don't need to take it to the extreme like he does in the book. If you follow that method, it'll change the way you think about to-do lists, for the better.
Now at home I do have a system to organize papers by *when* we need to deal with them (think bills, permission slips, registrations, etc.). I made a stack of 183 (=366/2) plastic sleeves held together by 3 big binder rings. I labelled each sleeve with two days (the first is Jan 1 and Jan 2, etc.). Total cost about $50, and well worth it. The top sleeve has today's date on it. When you get a new physical thing that you need to deal with at a later date, you stick it in that date's sleeve. Every 2 days you just flip the top page over. Now you only have relevant stuff on top to deal with.
For other things that just have to be done on a certain day, you just need a regular old calendar app. Google calendar is great because you can share it with your spouse. The GTD method talks about calendars too.
A good companion to GTD is still the whole "time quadrant" chapter from 7 Habits of Highly Effecive People. If your time is in demand, you can't possibly do everything people want of you. The quadrant idea help filter out the crap.
.. we either we end up automate everything and become the ultimate slackers, or we fail to stay on top of the automation so that we eventually will be replaced by machines altogether.
You can only become the ultimate slacker if you own the means of production. If not, then you have no money, no power, and you're just taking up resources that someone has to give you. So far automation has only worked in the realm of mass production, and mass production only works if you have a lot of people producing a decent amount of value to trade with the mass producer. Either the status quo stays the same and people just have to do the non-mass-production stuff, or automation will become more capable of providing bespoke products and services. If the latter, then why would the people who own all the automation want to keep the rest of the slackers around?
Yeah, like those pyramids. Nobody ever benefited from them. Except the bazillion people who benefit from the tourism in Egypt ever year. Also, it's his money. He's American. He can do whatever the heck he wants with it. Last time I drove south along I-75 through Ohio there was a 3-storey tall Jesus standing at the side of the road at a church looking at the highway. Apparently it burned down, so they built it again. People build stupid shit all the time. At least he spent 42 million employing some skilled trades and apparently (according to TFA) filed at least one new patent during the process. People go to sporting events all the time. Far more than 42 million is spent. Is there a point to that? I fail to see it.
My advice is to just ignore the people saying things like "all men", and just assume that when people say "men" they are just being a little careless or talking with previously established context. It's not always the case, but you would be surprised how often it is and you end up having an engaging, interesting debate rather than hung up on trolls and slightly poor choice of words.
It's understandable, but it's not right and it needs to be challenged. My wife was recently at a conference, and around her table were only women. As they were talking, one of the other women commented that she accepted everyone... "except men... I hate men," she said. Nobody else at the table agreed with this woman, but nobody said anything or spoke up about it either. They just let it pass.
I say, don't get bent out of shape about it, but point it out.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, "burns you out" is exactly right. These communities all start off good and happy, and once you've answered the same question 100 times, you can't do it anymore, or you're just a jerk about it. I'm not much of a contributor on StackOverflow, but I have written some open source software and people email me to ask questions. I don't mind people asking me questions in general, but much more than half either didn't read the step-by-step instructions, or didn't do a cursory Google search, and some even ask you to do their job/homework for them, and you get tired of it after a while.
I've used StackOverflow since it was created. It's definitely hostile to people who don't do any amount of effort before posting a question (maybe that's newcomers?) You can't be a contributor on that site for long without getting frustrated at seeing people post homework questions again-and-again. It's even fairly hostile to people who do their own research before posting - if you can't figure something out and you post your question you'll definitely get a "you're doing it wrong" answer, and you'll often get an, "if you'd architected your software completely differently you'd never even have a problem like this" kind of answer.
However, I've never seen racist or sexist content there. Ever. Where did that data come from?
Maybe, but I also bought a made-in-the-USA shovel on Amazon, with prime two-day shipping. It was a specialty kind of shovel (wanted a trenching shovel with a long handle) and I couldn't find it in any local big-box stores (they only had short-handle variants). I never thought I'd buy a shovel online.
I don't use the video service - it didn't seem to have much that interested me. On the other hand, I regularly find stuff to buy that's less expensive than the store (even basic household items) that I regularly just order it from my phone when I realize I'm almost out. It arrives 2 days later. Even if it were the same price it'd be more convenient that I don't have to go to the store for one item, but it's almost always cheaper!
Also, many things that are $10 or $20 on Amazon or e-bay are $3.25 from AliExpress, free shipping, if you're willing to wait 6-8 weeks.
If it was public, there'd be enough people complaining about it to change it (here anyway). My point is that it's the fact that I don't even know how many points I have, and I try to get on a plane and can't - that's so much worse.
We have "demerit" points on our drivers license here in Ontario. As long as the system is transparent (you broke this law, -25 points, you paid your tax on time, +2 points, etc.) then it's not so bad. Post the account history publicly for each person. However, if the algorithm is a secret, that's a really big problem. You know all the Supreme Leader's buddies are going to have padded scores, right...
It definitely sounded like bad management. She blamed someone else for messing up the accounting, but ultimately she's responsible. If you don't have a "buck stops here" attitude, then maybe management's the wrong place for you. She talks about picking battles but it seems to me that fighting workplace bullying is a good battle to pick. It could have gone like this, "Here's the workplace harassment policy," and then two weeks later, "you've violated the workplace harassment policy 3 times, getting a verbal and written notice one your first and second violation. You are now being sent home without pay...". Fourth infringement is termination with cause. (I realize that won't hold up in court, so you still have to pay termination pay, but it's always worth getting rid of problem employees.)
It's at least an interesting example of what not to do. Damn, that sounded awful!
It's already "hacked" by a voyeur: Amazon! There was an article last year about the Roomba (or Neato?) CEO saying he wanted to collect information about the inside of your home and sell it. This Amazon stuff (Alexa, robot) is exactly for this purpose. Forget that.
Saying that crocodilians are generally considered descended from dinosaurs doesn't seem to be correct. See here for instance. Crocodilians and dinosaurs are both archosaurs, sharing a common ancestor. Birds are descended from the dinosaurs, likely
I wonder if birds can taste the toxins then, since they're descended from dinosaurs and survived, though apparently at their worst they were down to a fairly small population on a remote island somewhere. (Can't remember where I read that...)
It's very likely not a false positive if it happens well above the level of chance and is repeatable by other people.
This is one of those cases where a bunch of citizen scientists could easily perform a whole bunch of repeatable experiments and publish the results and we could know with quite a bit of certainty if this was happening or not. As it stands, people are being lazy about it.
There's a difference between advertising-supported businesses of old, like newspapers and television commercials, and what we have now which is selling the data more than selling the eyeballs.
One of the outstanding questions was, "what do you do with all the excavated material?" Turns out he intends to make them into bricks (consider the description - life size, holes through the middle, withstand an earthquake) and sell them. Yes, bricks are lego-like. So it's not that crazy. He's just hoping to turn the excavated material into a building product.
I'm a bit shocked that it's such a big story now, but I realize most people still weren't thinking about the fact that they were the product with this scheme. Even now, you don't trust Facebook but you trust Google? That's crazy to me, but the typical response of most people is to love the new shiny, and once you've made that choice, you'll tell yourself any convenient story to keep that illusion alive, until you're faced with overwhelming evidence like this.
Thanks for the informative post. You're right that it's the ability of someone to publicly post the information needed to decrypt their messages that breaks the system, whether that's a broadcast public key, or their own private key, or a seed. As soon as that information becomes public, you allow griefing. The point was to foil metadata collection, but I honestly think there's probably better ways to go about it. BitMessage is interesting as an example of what doesn't really work.
My memory is a bit funny, but I don't think there's anything that prevents you from encrypting with your private key. In fact, I believe signing is just creating a hash of the message and then encrypting the hash with your private key. As the receiver, I computer the hash on the message, then decrypt the signature with your public key and validate it matches the hash I calculated. However in this case I believe they were encrypting the entire message with the private key. Again, it's been a while.
I believe it was the forum and/or newsgroup related to the development of the messaging protocol itself.
For a moment a few years ago I was interested in some kind of crypto messaging system loosely based on the concept of BitTorrent (I forget the name, like BitMessage or something) but your PC, acting as a node, basically got a copy of every message, encrypted, and your client could only decrypt the messages that were encrypted with your public key, so you could only read your mail. So far so good... if your PC had a copy of a message with illegal material in it, you'd have plausible deniability - there's no way you could read it without the recipient's key so no (sane) court would convict you for possession.
The problem is the system also supported broadcast messages. So I could write a message encrypted with my private key, and everyone who had my public key could decrypt it. It offers a way of authenticating that a certain person sent a message. The problem is, now I've potentially got illegal content on my PC and since the key to decrypt it is public, I can no longer claim I can't read it. Any forensic group could grab my PC and "prove" that it had illegal content on it very easily. In fact, it allows someone to plant easily provable illegal content on everyone's PC. Bad idea.
I brought up this issue, but nobody on the forums took it seriously. I gave up on the whole idea after that. Seems to me the idea of allowing random text into the blockchain is an obviously bad idea. I didn't even realize that was possible.
If you are thinking about lists with due dates then you're already in trouble. The best method I've found over many years is the Getting Things Done (GTD) method, though you don't need to take it to the extreme like he does in the book. If you follow that method, it'll change the way you think about to-do lists, for the better.
Now at home I do have a system to organize papers by *when* we need to deal with them (think bills, permission slips, registrations, etc.). I made a stack of 183 (=366/2) plastic sleeves held together by 3 big binder rings. I labelled each sleeve with two days (the first is Jan 1 and Jan 2, etc.). Total cost about $50, and well worth it. The top sleeve has today's date on it. When you get a new physical thing that you need to deal with at a later date, you stick it in that date's sleeve. Every 2 days you just flip the top page over. Now you only have relevant stuff on top to deal with.
For other things that just have to be done on a certain day, you just need a regular old calendar app. Google calendar is great because you can share it with your spouse. The GTD method talks about calendars too.
A good companion to GTD is still the whole "time quadrant" chapter from 7 Habits of Highly Effecive People. If your time is in demand, you can't possibly do everything people want of you. The quadrant idea help filter out the crap.
.. we either we end up automate everything and become the ultimate slackers, or we fail to stay on top of the automation so that we eventually will be replaced by machines altogether.
You can only become the ultimate slacker if you own the means of production. If not, then you have no money, no power, and you're just taking up resources that someone has to give you. So far automation has only worked in the realm of mass production, and mass production only works if you have a lot of people producing a decent amount of value to trade with the mass producer. Either the status quo stays the same and people just have to do the non-mass-production stuff, or automation will become more capable of providing bespoke products and services. If the latter, then why would the people who own all the automation want to keep the rest of the slackers around?
Yeah, like those pyramids. Nobody ever benefited from them. Except the bazillion people who benefit from the tourism in Egypt ever year. Also, it's his money. He's American. He can do whatever the heck he wants with it. Last time I drove south along I-75 through Ohio there was a 3-storey tall Jesus standing at the side of the road at a church looking at the highway. Apparently it burned down, so they built it again. People build stupid shit all the time. At least he spent 42 million employing some skilled trades and apparently (according to TFA) filed at least one new patent during the process. People go to sporting events all the time. Far more than 42 million is spent. Is there a point to that? I fail to see it.
A story about Russia meddling, and immediately the Ivan's come out to comment first. Right on cue.
My advice is to just ignore the people saying things like "all men", and just assume that when people say "men" they are just being a little careless or talking with previously established context. It's not always the case, but you would be surprised how often it is and you end up having an engaging, interesting debate rather than hung up on trolls and slightly poor choice of words.
It's understandable, but it's not right and it needs to be challenged. My wife was recently at a conference, and around her table were only women. As they were talking, one of the other women commented that she accepted everyone... "except men... I hate men," she said. Nobody else at the table agreed with this woman, but nobody said anything or spoke up about it either. They just let it pass.
I say, don't get bent out of shape about it, but point it out.