Quirky, not to everyone's taste (yay!), and damn interesting compared to the same 15 minutes invested in 99% of what my own childhood offered up.
This episode takes as its starting point a historical perspective from contrarian historian Willem van Schendel: that the mountain people weren't listless barbarians, but conscientious refugees of valley civilization (primarily organized around taxation, conscription, and surplus production—especially in the insanely fertile Nile valley, still the defining crowd-sourced achievement of civilization's pre-pubescent growth spurt).
This Crash Course episode's thesis concerns a region of Southeast Asia known as Zomia. The central region encompasses the highlands of north Indochina, Thailand, northern Myanmar; and the mountains of Southwest China. The expanded region extends as far west as Tibet, Northeast India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
Books are heavy. Even a level-headed ox will give you the evil eye humping the library of Alexandria from one stop to another along the Alexandria roadie tour.
A level-headed mountain goat is hard to find (even if you head into town and consult Critonslist). No books for you. So we really don't know much about the Zomians from their own point of view.
Merely contemplating the Nile valley as a squabbling fiefdom of a dozen city states makes me ill.
It's an old, old Zomian sentiment. (I can't prove that for a fact, but I know it's true.)
———
Sturgeon's first corollary: 90% of everything flows towards convenience.
Quelle surprise, it's happened again.
The problem with convenience is that it's barely compatible with principle at the best of times, and actively malign on any average day, in a slow, lazy way—the kind of slow, lazy way that ultimately carves out entire river deltas.
———
My trusty phrenologist has told me I should write a book someday, if merely to relieve the pressure.
You: What tools do you use to write? Me: Microsoft Word. To format print books for self-publishing, I use InDesign. I format ebooks with Jutoh (nonfiction) and Vellum (fiction). My main desktop runs whatever I'm writing about, FreeBSD at the moment. I have a Windows laptop for InDesign and Microsoft Office.
You: "Microsoft Office? InDesign?" Really? Me:? Yep. Many publishers, publishing tools, and self-pub platforms expect bug-for-bug compatibility with Microsoft Word. While LibreOffice is good enough for novels, using a product other than Word for complex documents gives iffy results. ... Bug-for-bug compatibility with MS Word and InDesign are essential. I wish it wasn't. But the business reality is, LibreOffice gets me reader complaints. Word doesn't. LaTeX gives me interoperability problems. InDesign doesn't.
You: But LibreOffice/LaTeX/other free solution! Me: Look, I've been doing this for over twenty years. I know this business and the technology. Do you think I like being stuck in Microsoft–Adobe Hell?
(Sorry, Michael, the counter-force runs strong in this one: I actually changed your hyphen in Microsoft-Adobe to an ndash—here on stone-age Slashdot—as any TeXie would.)
So now I need to get back to my trusty phrenologist ASAP to question his advice that "writing a book" would "relieve the pressure" if it directly lands me inside the inner circle of Microsoft–Adobe.
So now we have a second reason why history is rarely recorded by the Zomians.
But the problem was that, if the automation turns the rudder let's say left, the ship will not turn instantaneously, instead it needs a long course, for ships do not steer like like cars, instead they have a big hysteresis.
Another problem is also that when the ship finally turns to the right direction and the automation turns the rudder straight, the ship keeps turning left due to inertia and many other parameters like populism, bloviation, and general ignorance.
Pull your head out of your sandbox. The American medical system isn't smaller than a midsize, coal-fired destroyer.
Or so the author believed. I'm not sure Robert Fulghum ever grasped the PID-controller dynamics of any system too large to model in his childhood sandbox (and all around cat-turd collector) under his mother's kitchen's deck.
Think what a better world it would be if all — the whole world — had cookies and milk about three o'clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap.
Or if all governments had a basic policy to always put thing back where they found them and to clean up their own mess.
At government scale, merely keeping things where you found them involves multiply nested PID controllers. Of course, if we updated kindergarten to Ender's Game, we finally get somewhere. Inertia, it's a thing.
The goal of the polity is not to put homosexuals in jail. The goal is to discourage people from engaging in homosexual practices in the first place, and, when they nevertheless proceed in their homosexual behavior, to encourage them to do so discreetly, so as not shake the confidence of the community in polity's ability to provide rules for safe, dependable marriage and family relationships.
Man, and this is the guy who invented a kindergarten actually worth having, and he still believes the average citizen can't maintain his/her/zher own moral compass heading if anything weird is going on, on the other side of any fence, in the whole damn town. Oh, the exponential, global disruption of one improperly trimmed lawn.
Apparently, not only do straight(-ish) Mormons need a moral PID-controller equipped with a loud pulpit, but they also need the sea around them artificially calmed—or who the fuck knows how they'd behave?
Maybe it is true, though, that women (and Asians) can't parallel park because they didn't play in the sandbox enough at the right age.
Amazing how much I learned, really, when not a single one of my Hot Wheels articulated anything: my entire childhood's cat-shit show was managed with ice-rink physics and fist-of-God flubber.
Hot Wheels: one entire mind-blowing degree of freedom (linear translation), cruise-control not included.
But go ahead, comment on Obamacare as if kindergarten was general-purpose PhD.
The 60 DWPD warranty over 5 years pretty much sums this up.
A single DDR4 interface offers about 20 GB/s bandwidth. Over five years, that's 3.15 exabytes, under continuous write traffic (LIGO could generate this access pattern, I suspect).
1 TB * 60 writes/day * 5 years = 109 petabytes.
(The article only implies 5 years rather than 3 years, but I chose the generous figure.)
I work that out at around a 3.5% write bandwidth utilization over the warranty lifecycle (less than 2% the 512 GB part, less than 1% for the 256 GB part).
Clearly this is not your father's DRAM replacement.
But I can sure imagine this being the sweet spot for a ZFS NAS server's L2ARC (if cache occupancy is fairly stable).
And there's probably some substantial latency optimizations to be had for not going over NVMe (an interface which is pretty busy writing your ZIL to something with a lot more write depth, anyway).
Last time it was 2000 signatures. This time it's 3000 signatures.
For every extra 1000 signatures (from people who actually belong to the field), I'll gladly read this submission again for the rest of my biological span.
That is a 5 times increase in less than 65 years. Is there anyone who thinks that is sustainable?
You mean another five-fold growth over the next 65 years? Funny thing about exponential curves: another 45 years of Moore's law would require re-inventing the atom.
Exponential growth is not sustainable. That's what "exponential" actually means. There's two kinds of inflation in this world: comic inflation, and cosmic inflation. Only cosmic inflation never runs out of elbow room. News for Nerds, now in high middle age (with burgeoning male pattern baldness), and we're still overrun by bald appeals to comic inflation.
Or did you mean to ask whether Pakistan's current population of 200 million is sustainable, at that number, with no further growth, and no immediate shrinkage.
Washington Post: A disaster in the making — 9 September 2017
"The exploding population bomb has put the entire country's future in jeopardy," columnist Zahid Hussain wrote in the Dawn newspaper recently. With 60 percent of the population younger than 30, nearly a third of Pakistanis living in poverty and only 58 percent literate, he added, "this is a disaster in the making."
The chief causes of the continuing surge, according to population experts, include religious taboos, political timidity and public ignorance, especially in rural areas. Only a third of married Pakistani women use any form of birth control, and the only family-planning method sanctioned by most Islamic clerics is spacing births by breast-feeding newborns for two years.
It seems to be that the function of Catholic clerics is to deny our population of effective birth control; whereas the function of Islamic clerics is to deny their population of effective birth control. The poverty/sin cycle is good for business. (Especially if your baptismal basin has priority claim on the fresh water supply.)
We seem to forget, however, that birth control (BC) is a relatively modern human invention. Before the BC epoch, clerics everywhere did a tidy little business in tiny tombstones.
Evolution always has a solid backup plan, even if we don't.
Nothing exempts advertising from the iron law of consumers voting with their feet (and fetii).
The expressed preference (for now) of 90% of the consuming public is to have to their purchasing biases shaped implicitly without lifting a finger (over and above the next clickbait bikini), rather than deliberately apply their faculty of reason to a cornucopia of quantitative information that's only ever another finger-click away (at least in outline; some assembly required for a fully-resolved view).
Evolution probably scores this as a loss, sort of: Mr Clickbait Bikini probably fathers a large brood of downwardly mobile future Fox and Friends fanatics, none of whom will qualify for a berth on Noah's ark if global geopolitical shit someday hits the fan.
90% of consumers are presently piling onto the high-r, low-K bandwagon. They could yet win. Only time will tell.
———
Father, I have sinned.
The plural form *fetii is doubly incorrect. Firstly, fetus derives from Latin's fourth declension, meaning that its etymologically consistent plural form would be fetus; the -us goes to -i rule is a pattern of the second declension.
Secondly, even if fetus were a second-declension noun, the plural form would be *feti; in the correct plurals radii and gladii, with which *fetii is analogous, the first 'i's are part of the words' stems (radi- and gladi-), and not their case endings. (src)
Their shortsightedness is the result of *not* listening to sound advice, including that of MBAs.
Clearly, in business school, they wrecked your brain.
Oracle made a staggering amount of money on their original business proposition by applying maximal extraction leverage at every opportunity.
Everyone knows that maximal extraction leads to an ultimate goodwill implosion. But the dividends alone from that stockpiled mountain of cash are a fine, eternal goodwill replacement. (Check any competent MBA textbook's index under "NPV".)
It's not the essential function of business to endure for all eternity. Sometimes a vigorous four-decade rape and exit is such a great plan as to make Napoleon himself blush with modesty.
The amazing thing here—at this point—is that this only a soft exit. Oracle is still poised to make another metric fuck-tonne on the downslope through liberal application of the Stockholm-syndrome vise grips. Shortsighted, FTW (and the plane, and the yacht, and the private island). The problem here is that Oracle's conduct was so ruthlessly effective, it's hard to spin any retrospective narrative that doesn't make capitalism stink, just a little bit.
It's definitely not what you learned from Capitalism Made Odourless (which I'm guessing is the primary MBA textbook that extirpated so many previously functioning brain cells).
Fortunately for you, given your educational background, modern neurology now believes that brain cells do regenerate, given time and half a chance. Try to avoid a second sustaining a second concussion over the next ten years or so. Hope remains for a full recovery.
Doing something to make things more difficult for a hacker is better than doing nothing to make things more difficult for a hacker. Unless you're lazy, as many of these things should be done as possible.
Using punched cards would make things harder for the hacker. So unless you're lazy, I foresee you've got some work to do.
Here's the funny thing: if you make your own staff inefficient by say 10%, then you end up requiring a 10% larger workforce.
Half of your basket of goods could not have been purchased for billions of dollars an item a mere fifty years ago (half of health care, almost all electronic devices, and all forms of information no longer obtained by consulting long, skinny drawers of catalog index cards).
Time to climb down off your Infowars-certified soap box. (Did Alex emphasize the importance of soap in your post-apocalyptic secure collapse-of-civilization refuge burrow? Did Alex mention that with modern, concentrated detergent, a little goes a long way?—only you still bought the belt-high crate and complimentary footstool, anyway?)
I mean, good grief, it's not like information is a valuable commodity in its own right. (Well, perhaps not if Alex Jones gets there first. But for the rest of us, we're wallowing in the unprecedented plenitude every day.)
Of course, all that gold coin is but a metaphor of the 21st century's digital excess. What the cartoon gets wrong is depicting the swim as only once daily, missing the whole thing about crossing a busy street while staring into your hand (as there were some kind of entrancing magic contained there).
... inflation eats away at my income a little every year. I'm being told that addressing climate change would kill jobs and in turn wages...
You probably thought that was a safe entry point to your sob story of rampant societal decay and malaise (thus it has ever been).
What's actually inflating is our knowledge of the world. Modern economists now segregate inflation into two distinct terms: one for goods (that which mostly comes from China), and one for services (that which mostly comes from human proximity).
Goods are actually deflating at present. For the purchase of goods, every year your income expands. Services continue to inflate (and this will only get worse as boomer embolism moves into their prime, health-services consumption years). For the purchase of services, every year your income shrinks.
So your sob story actually depends on your consumption mix (and how well you update your consumption mix with respect to new opportunities). For example, Japanese massage chairs are pretty darn good these days, if not exactly cheap. They are, however, a good, not a service. So you really can trade one for the other in many instances, if you keep your eyes open.
Perhaps—if you're drowning in a glass half-emptying—you should look harder.
An additional attack surface is one that exists if you install and run the software but doesn't exist when you don't install or run the software. Microsoft Defender adds an additional attack surface like any other antivirus software.
He/she meant an additional attack surface beyond the necessary entailment of the category itself. In language, "additional" can be deployed anywhere along the semantic chain, so long as the situation can get worse, or worser, or worstest.
However, depending on how Microsoft manages their AV team, it's not obvious that receiving code from this team is inherently better than receiving code from a third party. You'd think the internal lines of communication and access to deep information would help, but golly, when did that ever show up in Microsoft product quality in their first three decades, when the entire corporate ethos was "ship it now, fix it later" (if luck would have it that a fix remained feasible)?
I think the actual risk accruing to adding a third party to the mix is that it brings yet another aggressive business model to the table, and that AV software isn't in the business of protecting your computer, so much as in the business of making you believe that its your constant, faithful companion. Thus they have an inbuilt incentive to abuse the API in a way that Microsoft hasn't precisely catered to, and doesn't dogfood themselves.
But this is all pretty speculative. Surface is just a proxy, after all.
Had the proprietor acted in time, and purchased a sufficiently secure phone (instead of all those retentive burner phones), Essential Consultants LLC might still be New York's very own diplomatic Peshawar.
[*] Democrats and principled liberals would know it best as Peshtar (Peshawar + Ishtar).
Unfortunately, rock trolls squish you into culinary essence without so much as a howdy-do, or a quick inquiry into your Jahm Dough (who know rock trolls had a Boston-cream accent?). Besides, even if you try to squeak out "essential" you'll never get past the "ts" without the highly suggestible troll going "good idea" and ka-bam, one flat kettle of marrow-crux-lifeblood pate.
Despite their legendary suggestibility, rock trolls do tend to pass the marshmallow test, and are thus prone to stocking root cellars with many excellent preserves.
Cohen's essence—which is simply too delicious for his own good—could be facing thirty years in the regularly-ventilated fruit-leather infirmary, depending on how he jockeys the rest of his already broken hand.
This morning, on my YouTube account, in the YouTube comment box, cut and copy were working, but paste (keyboard and mouse) were not. However, drag and drop paste was working normally, so I just had to use a two-step workaround (paste somewhere else, then drag and drop).
My configuration is pretty weird, so I don't draw conclusions right away. Most of these anomalies go away within a few days.
That said, it was standard-issue social media helplessness nevertheless. Nothing about my user interaction is fully documented or defined, and YouTube reserves the right to fuck over any damn thing they want at any damn time.
I don't approve of this business model and I govern myself accordingly. If I care at all about my words, I keep my own copies of everything I contribute to a social media platform. I never click "subscribe" on any feed whatsoever. And I'm always prepared to M*A*S*H my way to the next social media Hamburger Hill user interface at the code drop of a random A/B whim.
———
The one time I really lost it was when Google changed the format of my search results to some god-awful multiplicity of carousels, rather than just the simple links. I spent two hours crafting some user CSS to dis-abominate the worst of it, and it was still bad.
But fortunately either I dropped out of Satanic side of this particular A/B test pool, or Google's telemetry convinced them it was the worst idea since hydrogenated palm oil, and about a week later my Google search results were back to a bearable normality.
Personal policy: never click on a carousel link ever. Hate the damn things, may they all die in a fire.
And if the carousel moves on its own accord, exit stage left within 1500 ms (20% chance your back button is screwed over, so my mouse is always heading for the history drop-down, just in case).
You'll find me further down, clicking on the REST of the page.
If I really have to stick around and interact with a moving carousel, I usually font-change or resize and window drag my window until the carousel is entirely off screen.
Finding myself feeling compelled to linger on a carousel page usually triggers the five whys: why I am accessing this page? why am I accessing this site? why I am engaging this topic? why am I using this search tool? why I have taken on this project?
———
Why am I such a die-hard crank about carousel evasion?
Because it works. The gradient of life is complex, with not many robust signals. There are few signals I've encountered with a better cognitive ROI than fleeing the carousel, gleefully heedless of any small, short-term pain.
So you can imagine my humid outward eardrum pucker the day that Google randomly larded up my Google results with cards and carousels, and carousels and cards.
———
Google probably sees this as just another of 10,000 A/B interface trials. My amygdala and my insula saw it differently. And those little suckers forget never.
Antitrust investigation of Google? Well, the rational part of my brain thinks this is a bad thing, because Google is far from the worst offender. Meanwhile, a deep emotional center in my brain will dance a Black Swan gig.
———
The arrogance of these social media empires: even when I'm at rage factor 11, there's still no button offered for me to punch out of an A/B trial gone hopelessly sideways, waaay down the Nung River, deep into permanent lizard-brain antipathy.
Hey, Big Brother, hurry up with that 24/7 face-camera sentiment analysis, because you don't know what you don't measure. At least, I guess that's your best excuse.
At one end of the climate science buffet we have the reliable, traditional cuisine: that CO2 and methane (and water vapour) function as greenhouse gasses, that burning an aggregate trillion barrels of fossil fuel is enough to make a difference on a planetary scale, that we are presently in a warming cycle (of what duration, not yet certain), that certain mitigations are already cost-effective (solar roofs in California, minimizing hyper-disposable electronic goods), that the ocean is a carbon sink, and that this does result in increased acidification (which is at least a short-term stressor to shellfish and coral with a potentially dire outcome).
To argue otherwise on any of these points at this juncture is to fly your kook flag. But then as you move along, each additional "scientific" hors d'oeuvre becomes increasingly sketchy, culminating in leftist kook-caviar castles of sand.
By the time scientific economists (is there such a thing?) start spouting off about "trillions" of this or that (in notoriously slippery dollar units), the coefficient of ass-pull is no longer compatible with western civilization's august and respectable legacy of hard science.
I've been reading a number of books lately about the history of science and technology (Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention That Launched the Military-Industrial Complex, Turing's Cathedral, various books by Tim Wu). Every one of these books has commented, either implicitly or straight out, on the nearly universal truth: the better the scientist, the worse the budget estimate.
There were a few skilled scientific administrators in the mix (Lawrence, Oppenheimer, Veblen) but these were the exceptions, not the norm. Those were bad budget estimates without even wading into the N=1 global prognostication quagmire, or adding an actual economist to the mix.
An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.
If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion. — George Bernard Shaw
Economists have allowed themselves to walk into a trap where we say we can forecast, but no serious economist thinks we can.
Economists, like royal children, are not punished for their errors.
Did you mother teach you that two wrongs make a right?
Because that's the only feasible way Ms. Geophysicist and Mr. Economist in glorious union are going to lick the platter clean.
Eventually the MBA's and the accountants start smelling money and overrule the people who care. Unless you have a strong leader who can stand up to these types of people it is going to happen to any company.
Which is why consumers with a clue should have taken precautionary measures to prevent the entire product segment from degenerating into a walled-garden duopoly.
Because holding all four railroads or both utilities is massive bean-sniffer power up. Ensconced on a fantasy island of Florin/Guilder (also known as rich/raff), the bean counters always win. And now the piper extracts his pound of flesh, almost with indifference: So it bends. Big deal. Pay us again, skater Sam (of the big grab) and slender Samantha (of the tiny clutch).
These are people who are abusing the system, and they deserve the bans (well, maybe some of them don't, but I strongly suspect they all do).
It's not good enough that some of the maybe don't, but certainly have almost no recourse if Amazon has screwed the pooch, whether by mistake, or malice, or malignant DNA.
Google's no appeals whatsoever policy sure had an evil smell.
And I generally think that Google has done okay on being a mammoth corporate entity, navigating the post–Gordon Gecko apocalyptic landscape.
OTOH, pretty much everything Amazon does has an evil smell, or is capable of producing one further down the road.
Apple actually makes a decent competing product that deserves to be in the price range that it is in.
With Apple, the price of the product includes both the phone and the restrictive walled garden.
Whether the price is justified or not depends on your attitude toward walled gardens.
Turns out, walled gardens are very popular among garden gnomes owned by Shire folk, but in truth, some of them have never wandered close enough to the garden boundaries to figure out there's a wall after all. That garden gnomes owned by Shire folk devour seed cakes almost as persistently as hummingbirds just might have something to do with their reduced, un-ranger range.
"Every person I know learned what a vegetable is as a child"
The animate/inanimate distinction is pretty much built into baby's BIOS.
Vegetables are soft things that don't run away when approaching with sharp metal instruments. Nuts are hard things that don't run away under the same circumstances. Fruits are things go from hard and tart to soft and sugary, tend to fall from trees, when too soft, and have flavours suitable to a box of Fruit Loops (from which asparagus and broccoli are notably absent).
Never underestimate Fruit Loops as a defining nexus of childhood cognition. Tomato-flavoured Fruit Loops? Never gonna happen.
"Who wants to go play at Joey's house?" [Facial expression only: Oh, no]—"is that the strange women who brings out the tomato treats," [further internal monologue: that kind of look like cookies, only they're not entirely unlike tea (how could anyone ever drink that stuff)? No thanks, I think I'll just sit here and lick specks of salty playdough off my fingers until my gums curdle.]
From that casual yet effective foundation, we then send them off for 18 years of formal education to fill in some of those spectacular, lingering categorical gaps.
With the advent of machine learning, we now have an anchor point on the validity and surprising effectiveness of distributed representation. The thing about DR is that it permits crude heuristics to form around a few key, early terms, while still permitting a long, slow, enormous evolution to 11-dan killer Go strategies.
Children learn 10,000 skills in parallel to a standard that's remarkable crude, yet sufficient.
House Party (1945–1969) was the original vehicle for Kids Say the Darnedest Things (which I knew as a musty, disintegrating book in my early childhood that already seemed to date my parents). I'm guessing that some of the children's observations about Cosby from Cosby's television tenure on a show of the same name were probably spot on—why does Mr Cosby switch from water spiked with sugar, salt, and lime to coffee the moment he's sure that everyone else is fast asleep?—and, eww, how does anyone ever drink that stuff? With no cream or sugar? Yuck!
Anyways, there's your assembled vegetable experts. Fill your boots. (And the tribute does end with 100 kisses, too.)
The underlying humour of that show is that we're all pretty sure that the girl who demanded 100 kisses at age six is still going to demand 100 kisses when she turns eighteen (only by then they'll be different kisses).
Even by age nine, I had already formed a personal conviction that Art Linkletter was a corny ham, and that beyond the superficial malapropisms (some of which really are funny the first time you hear them), he was playing to something innate to adults that I could not yet fully fathom, which I later ferreted out as the human propensity for batshit prejudgment (the same frontal-cortex evading short-circuit is responsible for determining that dog owners look like their dogs, which of course they do—except when they don't).
But even so, there is a grain of truth to the adult humour: human distributed representation is surprisingly good at retaining quirks and biases already in evidence at a young age. Case in point: it practically takes a degree in biology to move the tomato back to the garden side of the orchard. Never underestimate the set-for-life Fruit Loop tractor beam.
The typical engineer in the US is male, white, and middle aged, just like the typical giraffe is spotted, has four legs and is about 18 ft tall. Those are just facts. Picking typical representatives of a class to represent the class is not an "institutionalized bias".
A giraffe is hardly a typical exemplar of an exemplar, being the most unusual (and specialized) life form most children learn to recognize in their first year of speech (though perhaps some competition here from the kangaroo).
The giraffe is practically the archetype of a charismatic mega exemplar.
Whereas the gender and age of a human engineering population is merely an artefact of history, albeit a patriarchal colonial history that recently remade much of the world in its own image, before changing its own tune, in its sluggish (and now faltering) march of democracy.
The salient feature of an engineer is not his or her bits and bobs.
The salient feature of a giraffe is indeed its very long legs and neck (affecting diet, predation, physiology, behaviour and every other damn thing about giraffe existence).
To make this any more plain than that, I'd have to run it through a Dick and Jane Dr Seuss filter.
Destroyed is a morality play, designed to make humans even more central and important.
Displaced is scientific language for what evolution has always done.
New improved patriotic fleshlight: now comes in red, white, and blue (PETA approved). Because while you may be a perv, at least you're a loyal perv. No dispassionate white gloves for you, no siree, dudly death canon.
... everyone ignoring that Obama is very much a child of the Chicago political machine
I guess your net assertion is that Obama is an Kenyan mechanoid full of child crap.
Guess what? Fat Basterd just called: he want's his baby back, baby back, baby back bib back—it's his personal talk-radio good luck charm. Between Fat Basterd and his mechanical diaper dog, they lick the platter clean.
But outright pirating with no intent of attempting to reward the author for their work is just wrong. Even the worst movie ever made, if you find yourself distracted for 2 hours because of it deserves at least a little love.
I guess you missed the whole debate over generative culture: that the whole point of consuming culture is to acquire your own capacity to make more. Hint: music has been around a lot longer than copyright. (And theorems still get no copyright love.) Off hand, I'm guessing Lessig, Zittrain, and Shirky have all contributed to this discussion.
Good grief, people, aim higher than distraction tithes, in which the purpose of having a job is to make enough money to forget that you have a job, because said job is really nasty.
I've never figured out how to worship at the altar of commercialism without lowing my conception of what society aims to achieve.
So I'm telling you that my love for copyright is waiting for something closer to the generative, pre-commercial ideal.
This is literally what the entire consulting industry does. I've seen countless people leave companies only to form consultancies and bill themselves back to the companies they left at triple the price to fix the problems they were never able to.
You need to be somewhat naive about human interpersonal behaviour to find any of this surprising in the first place.
The best way to stay naive is to view the world through a "management is stupid" filter. (Really? This would, by itself, negate half the theory of efficient capital markets.)
The best way to become less naive is to view the world through a "management isn't stupid, but what they are doing sure doesn't solve what I thought was the problem in a direct way, so they must actually be solving a different problem".
Organizations have a lot of path dependence. It often matters far less whether the idea is right than who proposed it in the first place (and therefore, what the political trajectory of the idea implies for future promotions, performance bonuses, and downside survival chits).
"Management is stupid" is the sound that a thirsty horse makes standing beside a Theory of Mind drinking pond (aka cognitive empathy) it couldn't possibly deign to touch.
Slashdot Mirror
Yesterday, I was randomly indulging in one of the things we did expect:
Rethinking Civilization — Crash Course World History 201
Quirky, not to everyone's taste (yay!), and damn interesting compared to the same 15 minutes invested in 99% of what my own childhood offered up.
This episode takes as its starting point a historical perspective from contrarian historian Willem van Schendel: that the mountain people weren't listless barbarians, but conscientious refugees of valley civilization (primarily organized around taxation, conscription, and surplus production—especially in the insanely fertile Nile valley, still the defining crowd-sourced achievement of civilization's pre-pubescent growth spurt).
This Crash Course episode's thesis concerns a region of Southeast Asia known as Zomia. The central region encompasses the highlands of north Indochina, Thailand, northern Myanmar; and the mountains of Southwest China. The expanded region extends as far west as Tibet, Northeast India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
Books are heavy. Even a level-headed ox will give you the evil eye humping the library of Alexandria from one stop to another along the Alexandria roadie tour.
A level-headed mountain goat is hard to find (even if you head into town and consult Critonslist). No books for you. So we really don't know much about the Zomians from their own point of view.
It's an old, old Zomian sentiment. (I can't prove that for a fact, but I know it's true.)
———
Sturgeon's first corollary: 90% of everything flows towards convenience.
Quelle surprise, it's happened again.
The problem with convenience is that it's barely compatible with principle at the best of times, and actively malign on any average day, in a slow, lazy way—the kind of slow, lazy way that ultimately carves out entire river deltas.
———
My trusty phrenologist has told me I should write a book someday, if merely to relieve the pressure.
Michael W. Lucas: Frequently Asked Questions
(Sorry, Michael, the counter-force runs strong in this one: I actually changed your hyphen in Microsoft-Adobe to an ndash—here on stone-age Slashdot—as any TeXie would.)
So now I need to get back to my trusty phrenologist ASAP to question his advice that "writing a book" would "relieve the pressure" if it directly lands me inside the inner circle of Microsoft–Adobe.
So now we have a second reason why history is rarely recorded by the Zomians.
The reason this works f
Meanwhile, the prevailing elementary-school standard of discourse gaining sway in America sat this one out.
Giorgos Lazaridis On PID theory:
Pull your head out of your sandbox. The American medical system isn't smaller than a midsize, coal-fired destroyer.
All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten
Or so the author believed. I'm not sure Robert Fulghum ever grasped the PID-controller dynamics of any system too large to model in his childhood sandbox (and all around cat-turd collector) under his mother's kitchen's deck.
At government scale, merely keeping things where you found them involves multiply nested PID controllers. Of course, if we updated kindergarten to Ender's Game, we finally get somewhere. Inertia, it's a thing.
Man, and this is the guy who invented a kindergarten actually worth having, and he still believes the average citizen can't maintain his/her/zher own moral compass heading if anything weird is going on, on the other side of any fence, in the whole damn town. Oh, the exponential, global disruption of one improperly trimmed lawn.
Apparently, not only do straight(-ish) Mormons need a moral PID-controller equipped with a loud pulpit, but they also need the sea around them artificially calmed—or who the fuck knows how they'd behave?
Maybe it is true, though, that women (and Asians) can't parallel park because they didn't play in the sandbox enough at the right age.
Amazing how much I learned, really, when not a single one of my Hot Wheels articulated anything: my entire childhood's cat-shit show was managed with ice-rink physics and fist-of-God flubber.
Hot Wheels: one entire mind-blowing degree of freedom (linear translation), cruise-control not included.
But go ahead, comment on Obamacare as if kindergarten was general-purpose PhD.
Crap, I got all the capacities wrong by a factor of two, not that it changes much of anything.
The 60 DWPD warranty over 5 years pretty much sums this up.
A single DDR4 interface offers about 20 GB/s bandwidth. Over five years, that's 3.15 exabytes, under continuous write traffic (LIGO could generate this access pattern, I suspect).
1 TB * 60 writes/day * 5 years = 109 petabytes.
(The article only implies 5 years rather than 3 years, but I chose the generous figure.)
I work that out at around a 3.5% write bandwidth utilization over the warranty lifecycle (less than 2% the 512 GB part, less than 1% for the 256 GB part).
Clearly this is not your father's DRAM replacement.
But I can sure imagine this being the sweet spot for a ZFS NAS server's L2ARC (if cache occupancy is fairly stable).
And there's probably some substantial latency optimizations to be had for not going over NVMe (an interface which is pretty busy writing your ZIL to something with a lot more write depth, anyway).
Last time it was 2000 signatures. This time it's 3000 signatures.
For every extra 1000 signatures (from people who actually belong to the field), I'll gladly read this submission again for the rest of my biological span.
You mean another five-fold growth over the next 65 years? Funny thing about exponential curves: another 45 years of Moore's law would require re-inventing the atom.
Exponential growth is not sustainable. That's what "exponential" actually means. There's two kinds of inflation in this world: comic inflation, and cosmic inflation. Only cosmic inflation never runs out of elbow room. News for Nerds, now in high middle age (with burgeoning male pattern baldness), and we're still overrun by bald appeals to comic inflation.
Or did you mean to ask whether Pakistan's current population of 200 million is sustainable, at that number, with no further growth, and no immediate shrinkage.
Washington Post: A disaster in the making — 9 September 2017
It seems to be that the function of Catholic clerics is to deny our population of effective birth control; whereas the function of Islamic clerics is to deny their population of effective birth control. The poverty/sin cycle is good for business. (Especially if your baptismal basin has priority claim on the fresh water supply.)
We seem to forget, however, that birth control (BC) is a relatively modern human invention. Before the BC epoch, clerics everywhere did a tidy little business in tiny tombstones.
Evolution always has a solid backup plan, even if we don't.
Nothing exempts advertising from the iron law of consumers voting with their feet (and fetii).
The expressed preference (for now) of 90% of the consuming public is to have to their purchasing biases shaped implicitly without lifting a finger (over and above the next clickbait bikini), rather than deliberately apply their faculty of reason to a cornucopia of quantitative information that's only ever another finger-click away (at least in outline; some assembly required for a fully-resolved view).
Evolution probably scores this as a loss, sort of: Mr Clickbait Bikini probably fathers a large brood of downwardly mobile future Fox and Friends fanatics, none of whom will qualify for a berth on Noah's ark if global geopolitical shit someday hits the fan.
r/K selection theory
90% of consumers are presently piling onto the high-r, low-K bandwagon. They could yet win. Only time will tell.
———
Father, I have sinned.
Clearly, in business school, they wrecked your brain.
Oracle made a staggering amount of money on their original business proposition by applying maximal extraction leverage at every opportunity.
Everyone knows that maximal extraction leads to an ultimate goodwill implosion. But the dividends alone from that stockpiled mountain of cash are a fine, eternal goodwill replacement. (Check any competent MBA textbook's index under "NPV".)
It's not the essential function of business to endure for all eternity. Sometimes a vigorous four-decade rape and exit is such a great plan as to make Napoleon himself blush with modesty.
The amazing thing here—at this point—is that this only a soft exit. Oracle is still poised to make another metric fuck-tonne on the downslope through liberal application of the Stockholm-syndrome vise grips. Shortsighted, FTW (and the plane, and the yacht, and the private island). The problem here is that Oracle's conduct was so ruthlessly effective, it's hard to spin any retrospective narrative that doesn't make capitalism stink, just a little bit.
It's definitely not what you learned from Capitalism Made Odourless (which I'm guessing is the primary MBA textbook that extirpated so many previously functioning brain cells).
Fortunately for you, given your educational background, modern neurology now believes that brain cells do regenerate, given time and half a chance. Try to avoid a second sustaining a second concussion over the next ten years or so. Hope remains for a full recovery.
Using punched cards would make things harder for the hacker. So unless you're lazy, I foresee you've got some work to do.
Here's the funny thing: if you make your own staff inefficient by say 10%, then you end up requiring a 10% larger workforce.
attack_surface = size_of_workforce *
enabled_software_functionality;
Of course, this equation is beyond the pay grade of most security professionals, size_of_workforce being upper management and boardroom pay grade.
Yet (somehow) not so far above the security professional pay grade than any serious security profession suggests an actual return to punched cards.
Instead they traffic in nickels and dimes.
Double face palm.
Half of your basket of goods could not have been purchased for billions of dollars an item a mere fifty years ago (half of health care, almost all electronic devices, and all forms of information no longer obtained by consulting long, skinny drawers of catalog index cards).
Time to climb down off your Infowars-certified soap box. (Did Alex emphasize the importance of soap in your post-apocalyptic secure collapse-of-civilization refuge burrow? Did Alex mention that with modern, concentrated detergent, a little goes a long way?—only you still bought the belt-high crate and complimentary footstool, anyway?)
I mean, good grief, it's not like information is a valuable commodity in its own right. (Well, perhaps not if Alex Jones gets there first. But for the rest of us, we're wallowing in the unprecedented plenitude every day.)
Uncle Scrooge – The Daily Money Swim
Of course, all that gold coin is but a metaphor of the 21st century's digital excess. What the cartoon gets wrong is depicting the swim as only once daily, missing the whole thing about crossing a busy street while staring into your hand (as there were some kind of entrancing magic contained there).
You probably thought that was a safe entry point to your sob story of rampant societal decay and malaise (thus it has ever been).
What's actually inflating is our knowledge of the world. Modern economists now segregate inflation into two distinct terms: one for goods (that which mostly comes from China), and one for services (that which mostly comes from human proximity).
Goods are actually deflating at present. For the purchase of goods, every year your income expands. Services continue to inflate (and this will only get worse as boomer embolism moves into their prime, health-services consumption years). For the purchase of services, every year your income shrinks.
So your sob story actually depends on your consumption mix (and how well you update your consumption mix with respect to new opportunities). For example, Japanese massage chairs are pretty darn good these days, if not exactly cheap. They are, however, a good, not a service. So you really can trade one for the other in many instances, if you keep your eyes open.
Perhaps—if you're drowning in a glass half-emptying—you should look harder.
He/she meant an additional attack surface beyond the necessary entailment of the category itself. In language, "additional" can be deployed anywhere along the semantic chain, so long as the situation can get worse, or worser, or worstest.
However, depending on how Microsoft manages their AV team, it's not obvious that receiving code from this team is inherently better than receiving code from a third party. You'd think the internal lines of communication and access to deep information would help, but golly, when did that ever show up in Microsoft product quality in their first three decades, when the entire corporate ethos was "ship it now, fix it later" (if luck would have it that a fix remained feasible)?
I think the actual risk accruing to adding a third party to the mix is that it brings yet another aggressive business model to the table, and that AV software isn't in the business of protecting your computer, so much as in the business of making you believe that its your constant, faithful companion. Thus they have an inbuilt incentive to abuse the API in a way that Microsoft hasn't precisely catered to, and doesn't dogfood themselves.
But this is all pretty speculative. Surface is just a proxy, after all.
Had the proprietor acted in time, and purchased a sufficiently secure phone (instead of all those retentive burner phones), Essential Consultants LLC might still be New York's very own diplomatic Peshawar.
[*] Democrats and principled liberals would know it best as Peshtar (Peshawar + Ishtar).
Unfortunately, rock trolls squish you into culinary essence without so much as a howdy-do, or a quick inquiry into your Jahm Dough (who know rock trolls had a Boston-cream accent?). Besides, even if you try to squeak out "essential" you'll never get past the "ts" without the highly suggestible troll going "good idea" and ka-bam, one flat kettle of marrow-crux-lifeblood pate.
Despite their legendary suggestibility, rock trolls do tend to pass the marshmallow test, and are thus prone to stocking root cellars with many excellent preserves.
Cohen's essence—which is simply too delicious for his own good—could be facing thirty years in the regularly-ventilated fruit-leather infirmary, depending on how he jockeys the rest of his already broken hand.
This morning, on my YouTube account, in the YouTube comment box, cut and copy were working, but paste (keyboard and mouse) were not. However, drag and drop paste was working normally, so I just had to use a two-step workaround (paste somewhere else, then drag and drop).
My configuration is pretty weird, so I don't draw conclusions right away. Most of these anomalies go away within a few days.
That said, it was standard-issue social media helplessness nevertheless. Nothing about my user interaction is fully documented or defined, and YouTube reserves the right to fuck over any damn thing they want at any damn time.
I don't approve of this business model and I govern myself accordingly. If I care at all about my words, I keep my own copies of everything I contribute to a social media platform. I never click "subscribe" on any feed whatsoever. And I'm always prepared to M*A*S*H my way to the next social media Hamburger Hill user interface at the code drop of a random A/B whim.
———
The one time I really lost it was when Google changed the format of my search results to some god-awful multiplicity of carousels, rather than just the simple links. I spent two hours crafting some user CSS to dis-abominate the worst of it, and it was still bad.
But fortunately either I dropped out of Satanic side of this particular A/B test pool, or Google's telemetry convinced them it was the worst idea since hydrogenated palm oil, and about a week later my Google search results were back to a bearable normality.
Personal policy: never click on a carousel link ever. Hate the damn things, may they all die in a fire.
And if the carousel moves on its own accord, exit stage left within 1500 ms (20% chance your back button is screwed over, so my mouse is always heading for the history drop-down, just in case).
You'll find me further down, clicking on the REST of the page.
If I really have to stick around and interact with a moving carousel, I usually font-change or resize and window drag my window until the carousel is entirely off screen.
Finding myself feeling compelled to linger on a carousel page usually triggers the five whys: why I am accessing this page? why am I accessing this site? why I am engaging this topic? why am I using this search tool? why I have taken on this project?
———
Why am I such a die-hard crank about carousel evasion?
Because it works. The gradient of life is complex, with not many robust signals. There are few signals I've encountered with a better cognitive ROI than fleeing the carousel, gleefully heedless of any small, short-term pain.
So you can imagine my humid outward eardrum pucker the day that Google randomly larded up my Google results with cards and carousels, and carousels and cards.
———
Google probably sees this as just another of 10,000 A/B interface trials. My amygdala and my insula saw it differently. And those little suckers forget never.
Antitrust investigation of Google? Well, the rational part of my brain thinks this is a bad thing, because Google is far from the worst offender. Meanwhile, a deep emotional center in my brain will dance a Black Swan gig.
———
The arrogance of these social media empires: even when I'm at rage factor 11, there's still no button offered for me to punch out of an A/B trial gone hopelessly sideways, waaay down the Nung River, deep into permanent lizard-brain antipathy.
Hey, Big Brother, hurry up with that 24/7 face-camera sentiment analysis, because you don't know what you don't measure. At least, I guess that's your best excuse.
At one end of the climate science buffet we have the reliable, traditional cuisine: that CO2 and methane (and water vapour) function as greenhouse gasses, that burning an aggregate trillion barrels of fossil fuel is enough to make a difference on a planetary scale, that we are presently in a warming cycle (of what duration, not yet certain), that certain mitigations are already cost-effective (solar roofs in California, minimizing hyper-disposable electronic goods), that the ocean is a carbon sink, and that this does result in increased acidification (which is at least a short-term stressor to shellfish and coral with a potentially dire outcome).
To argue otherwise on any of these points at this juncture is to fly your kook flag. But then as you move along, each additional "scientific" hors d'oeuvre becomes increasingly sketchy, culminating in leftist kook-caviar castles of sand.
By the time scientific economists (is there such a thing?) start spouting off about "trillions" of this or that (in notoriously slippery dollar units), the coefficient of ass-pull is no longer compatible with western civilization's august and respectable legacy of hard science.
I've been reading a number of books lately about the history of science and technology (Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention That Launched the Military-Industrial Complex, Turing's Cathedral, various books by Tim Wu). Every one of these books has commented, either implicitly or straight out, on the nearly universal truth: the better the scientist, the worse the budget estimate.
There were a few skilled scientific administrators in the mix (Lawrence, Oppenheimer, Veblen) but these were the exceptions, not the norm. Those were bad budget estimates without even wading into the N=1 global prognostication quagmire, or adding an actual economist to the mix.
Did you mother teach you that two wrongs make a right?
Because that's the only feasible way Ms. Geophysicist and Mr. Economist in glorious union are going to lick the platter clean.
Which is why consumers with a clue should have taken precautionary measures to prevent the entire product segment from degenerating into a walled-garden duopoly.
Because holding all four railroads or both utilities is massive bean-sniffer power up. Ensconced on a fantasy island of Florin/Guilder (also known as rich/raff), the bean counters always win. And now the piper extracts his pound of flesh, almost with indifference: So it bends. Big deal. Pay us again, skater Sam (of the big grab) and slender Samantha (of the tiny clutch).
It's not good enough that some of the maybe don't, but certainly have almost no recourse if Amazon has screwed the pooch, whether by mistake, or malice, or malignant DNA.
Google's no appeals whatsoever policy sure had an evil smell.
And I generally think that Google has done okay on being a mammoth corporate entity, navigating the post–Gordon Gecko apocalyptic landscape.
OTOH, pretty much everything Amazon does has an evil smell, or is capable of producing one further down the road.
Bezos gonna Bezos.
With Apple, the price of the product includes both the phone and the restrictive walled garden.
Whether the price is justified or not depends on your attitude toward walled gardens.
Turns out, walled gardens are very popular among garden gnomes owned by Shire folk, but in truth, some of them have never wandered close enough to the garden boundaries to figure out there's a wall after all. That garden gnomes owned by Shire folk devour seed cakes almost as persistently as hummingbirds just might have something to do with their reduced, un-ranger range.
The animate/inanimate distinction is pretty much built into baby's BIOS.
Vegetables are soft things that don't run away when approaching with sharp metal instruments. Nuts are hard things that don't run away under the same circumstances. Fruits are things go from hard and tart to soft and sugary, tend to fall from trees, when too soft, and have flavours suitable to a box of Fruit Loops (from which asparagus and broccoli are notably absent).
Never underestimate Fruit Loops as a defining nexus of childhood cognition. Tomato-flavoured Fruit Loops? Never gonna happen.
"Who wants to go play at Joey's house?" [Facial expression only: Oh, no]—"is that the strange women who brings out the tomato treats," [further internal monologue: that kind of look like cookies, only they're not entirely unlike tea (how could anyone ever drink that stuff)? No thanks, I think I'll just sit here and lick specks of salty playdough off my fingers until my gums curdle.]
From that casual yet effective foundation, we then send them off for 18 years of formal education to fill in some of those spectacular, lingering categorical gaps.
With the advent of machine learning, we now have an anchor point on the validity and surprising effectiveness of distributed representation. The thing about DR is that it permits crude heuristics to form around a few key, early terms, while still permitting a long, slow, enormous evolution to 11-dan killer Go strategies.
Children learn 10,000 skills in parallel to a standard that's remarkable crude, yet sufficient.
House Party (1945–1969) was the original vehicle for Kids Say the Darnedest Things (which I knew as a musty, disintegrating book in my early childhood that already seemed to date my parents). I'm guessing that some of the children's observations about Cosby from Cosby's television tenure on a show of the same name were probably spot on—why does Mr Cosby switch from water spiked with sugar, salt, and lime to coffee the moment he's sure that everyone else is fast asleep?—and, eww, how does anyone ever drink that stuff? With no cream or sugar? Yuck!
Cosby Tributes Art
Anyways, there's your assembled vegetable experts. Fill your boots. (And the tribute does end with 100 kisses, too.)
The underlying humour of that show is that we're all pretty sure that the girl who demanded 100 kisses at age six is still going to demand 100 kisses when she turns eighteen (only by then they'll be different kisses).
Even by age nine, I had already formed a personal conviction that Art Linkletter was a corny ham, and that beyond the superficial malapropisms (some of which really are funny the first time you hear them), he was playing to something innate to adults that I could not yet fully fathom, which I later ferreted out as the human propensity for batshit prejudgment (the same frontal-cortex evading short-circuit is responsible for determining that dog owners look like their dogs, which of course they do—except when they don't).
But even so, there is a grain of truth to the adult humour: human distributed representation is surprisingly good at retaining quirks and biases already in evidence at a young age. Case in point: it practically takes a degree in biology to move the tomato back to the garden side of the orchard. Never underestimate the set-for-life Fruit Loop tractor beam.
A giraffe is hardly a typical exemplar of an exemplar, being the most unusual (and specialized) life form most children learn to recognize in their first year of speech (though perhaps some competition here from the kangaroo).
The giraffe is practically the archetype of a charismatic mega exemplar.
Whereas the gender and age of a human engineering population is merely an artefact of history, albeit a patriarchal colonial history that recently remade much of the world in its own image, before changing its own tune, in its sluggish (and now faltering) march of democracy.
The salient feature of an engineer is not his or her bits and bobs.
The salient feature of a giraffe is indeed its very long legs and neck (affecting diet, predation, physiology, behaviour and every other damn thing about giraffe existence).
To make this any more plain than that, I'd have to run it through a Dick and Jane Dr Seuss filter.
Destroyed is a morality play, designed to make humans even more central and important.
Displaced is scientific language for what evolution has always done.
New improved patriotic fleshlight: now comes in red, white, and blue (PETA approved). Because while you may be a perv, at least you're a loyal perv. No dispassionate white gloves for you, no siree, dudly death canon.
I guess your net assertion is that Obama is an Kenyan mechanoid full of child crap.
Guess what? Fat Basterd just called: he want's his baby back, baby back, baby back bib back—it's his personal talk-radio good luck charm. Between Fat Basterd and his mechanical diaper dog, they lick the platter clean.
I guess you missed the whole debate over generative culture: that the whole point of consuming culture is to acquire your own capacity to make more. Hint: music has been around a lot longer than copyright. (And theorems still get no copyright love.) Off hand, I'm guessing Lessig, Zittrain, and Shirky have all contributed to this discussion.
Good grief, people, aim higher than distraction tithes, in which the purpose of having a job is to make enough money to forget that you have a job, because said job is really nasty.
I've never figured out how to worship at the altar of commercialism without lowing my conception of what society aims to achieve.
So I'm telling you that my love for copyright is waiting for something closer to the generative, pre-commercial ideal.
Append the word "filter" to appropriate sentence.
You need to be somewhat naive about human interpersonal behaviour to find any of this surprising in the first place.
The best way to stay naive is to view the world through a "management is stupid" filter. (Really? This would, by itself, negate half the theory of efficient capital markets.)
The best way to become less naive is to view the world through a "management isn't stupid, but what they are doing sure doesn't solve what I thought was the problem in a direct way, so they must actually be solving a different problem".
Organizations have a lot of path dependence. It often matters far less whether the idea is right than who proposed it in the first place (and therefore, what the political trajectory of the idea implies for future promotions, performance bonuses, and downside survival chits).
"Management is stupid" is the sound that a thirsty horse makes standing beside a Theory of Mind drinking pond (aka cognitive empathy) it couldn't possibly deign to touch.