Either the city leaders are completely incompetent and should be kicked out or they took kickbacks in someway and should be kicked out and imprisoned.
Giving kickbacks is twice the crime.
There seems to be this strange sentiment in modern America that given any illicit transaction between two parties, figure out who has less power, and throw that bastard in jail.
Seems backwards to me.
Sure if you want to make street walking illegal, lock up the prostitutes. But if you really want to make prostitution illegal, lock up the Johns—all the bankers, and bakers, and candlestick makers.
Same goes for the drug trade. Lock up the Hollywood celebrities who toss largess into the welcoming arms of Central Casting's dark corridor of thugs.
And while we're at it, lock up the California fruit farmers who pay Mexicans (for generations at a time) who don't have legal work permits.
Which really makes me wonder why he chose a baby, of all "human-like" things he could have done. The UV-reaction is actually stronger in humans when babies are used.... What's wrong with this guy?
First of all, this guy is flipping the bird at the uncanny valley with a big FU to the UV.
He's good, and he knows it.
Second, this project requires an enormous amount of experimental interaction time with the simulated being, and humans are programmed to tolerate fragmentary interactions with babies (subtype: who mainly speak only when spoken to) for a lot longer than dealing with the cognition-limited adult sitting next to you on the airplane.
Third, it's for the same reason that artists practice on "natural" models. If you're good, you want to heighten critique, and not run away at the first sign of an uphill gradient.
I've always regarded the UV as overrated. It's nought but craggy gully that separates the boys from the sheep. (Separating the men from the boys is a further challenge, long after the UV is well and truly in your RV mirror.)
I would also be reluctant to leave off trade and mechanization (e.g. the cotton gin) and mass production (beginning with the pyramids) from even the shortest list.
The purpose of this, aside from the humorous time travel, is to highlight that mass production is at root a social technology and was largely inherent in the invention of the city right from the get go.
What differentiated modern mass production was people becoming entirely captive to their specialization, such that even finding a second factory anywhere in the nearby territory in need of precisely the same skill would often prove daunting (early water-powered textile mills typically had unique equipment and did not have standardized roles—that came much later).
It was a whole new form of risky subservience, not so different from adopting agriculture, or fiat currency.
Or even more scary, fiatless currency, based on blockchains.
Fire, indoor plumbing and refrigeration don't make the cut?
I usually lump "fire" under exodigestion: the use of the external environment to predigest food, enabling disproportionate enlargement of the glucose-glutton human brain compared to the gut.
This category also includes fermentation and milling and other early "processed" foods obtained through the clever use of sticks (ultimately, pointy sticks) and rocks (ultimately, sharp rocks). One of the uses of food is to maintain body temperature, so fire gets a gold star compared to all the others, but still, it's the same thing.
Plumbing pretty much derives from metal casting (as does movable type), it just took a long time from the invention of the first lead pipes to reach the average residence.
What fully set this in motion was the germ theory of disease. If you want to split this off from metal casting, I would nominate the entire panoply of microbial hygiene (which treads on fermentation again, but with renewed vigour; and fire again, though smoke; and pretty much every other mode of food preservation).
Talk about plumbing taking a long time, it's only since 2000 that we've fully acknowledged the importance of the human microbiome (a mere 300 years after the first high-powered microscope, and 1900 years after Seneca first described magnification through shaped glass—glass itself being newly invented; having noted this point, it becomes almost impossible to leave various modes of exoperceptual enhancement off the list, as well).
At the apex of exodigestion and hygiene, refrigeration can reasonably be lumped under electrification, which absolutely can not be left off any such list.
Neither would I leave off syntactic communication (human language might have started off with complex hand signals used on the hunt, before syntax became oral) or man's best friend, domestication: anyone who thought the horse—properly tacked—wasn't disruptive never met the Mongols.
I would also be reluctant to leave off trade and mechanization (e.g. the cotton gin) and mass production from even the shortest list.
But of course this is a fractal, and you can come up with representative lumps at all scales. ____
What's actually going on with modern SV disruption porn is that it has become a way to communicate to investors that your play is all about going yard (taking a big, risky swing) rather than settling for a base hit (most nervous and risk-averse entrepreneurs are thrilled to score a base hit, but it leaves the moneybag with no immediate exit strategy, and he or she can become stuck watching the entire nickel and dime Moneyball operation eek out a slow win, while all the windfall profits drain away into actual salary).
A hundred PhD students could write their theses on the venture capital language dance and barely scratch the surface.
The poor sod in the middle—some milk of magnesia chugging Richard Hendricks—ends up trying to project Godel, Escher, Bach shadow bunnies in three simultaneous dimensions, for three different audiences (VC, employees, consumer).
Indeed a handful of other countries were arguing against Simon and Speck, but not on the merits of the algorithm, but on the history of the USA in crypto standards and SP800-90A in particular.
The "merits of the algorithm" is communally undefined if the design party is keeping secret the existence of differential cryptography—or any other advanced mode of attack—as IBM and the NSA once did with the DES. It was pretty clear that something fishy had gone into the design of the S-boxes. Whether fair or foul is impossible to decide when you're on the outside looking in (turns out, for DES, it was fair—foul play was confined to mandating a short key length).
What people don't understand is that as much as the Americans would like to read everyone else's traffic, it's far worse if any backdoor leaked to an adversary (your whole financial system is protected by these codes), so they were sensibly reluctant to put one in—until they invented the one-way back door, where only the designers could ever know. Unable to resist the siren call of this new brass ring, the NSA immediately blew their entire history of trust (which had always been more out of enlightened self-interest than gentlemanly) into a giant mushroom cloud.
It remains difficult to decide whether "merit" can be debated in these matters on a level playing field.
On the other side of the coin, while I'm far from a serious cryptographer, Specks' ARX design does not appear to leave many places for newly discovered snookery to hide itself.
That said, banning the runt versions smells like prudence to me, as any covert American attack is probably a combination of a downgrade attack—tricking a cipher to operate at less than full strength (world and dog are not freaking out over the Intel Management Engine for no reason)—perhaps injecting some known plaintext, finished off with a giant can of precomputed whup ass (the mechanism of attack one can best keep confined to your side of the fight is a multimodal attack).
Once you take the downgrade attacks off the table, it's a lot easier to swallow the inequitable debate on merit as a pure cipher.
ISO is a political organization and the arguments are political. Don't let technical considerations muddy the waters.
Not buying it. I really don't see how you performed that neat dissection of history from technology from capabilities, without the use of a white glove and a black hat. ____
Researchers believe Intel has added the ME disabling bit at the behest of the NSA, who needed a method of disabling ME as a security measure for computers running in highly sensitive environments. ME or any vulnerabilities in its firmware could lead to leaks of highly dangerous information, hence the reason why the NSA did not want to take the risk.
True to form, the NSA's greatest terror is being hoist by their own petard.
They don't advertise this fear, because they prefer to viewed through the do-unto-others side of the lens. Trying to turn these weapons into technological diodes is an enormous practical constraint.
That, and resource saturation (what they can do and what they can afford to do are two different beasts) are in my experience the only reliable external vantage points for 99.999999% of the planet's population incapable of wading into the merit debate at anywhere near eye level.
Several experiments in the last five years have consistently shown that we make many of our decisions before we are consciously aware of having done so. People just don't like the implications of that.
This leads me to wonder what theories of cloud mind have been constructed out there by people unfamiliar with buffer bloat.
Some of the qualms and presumptions must be truly staggering.
These credit agencies have special legal exemptions from slander and liability law. If incorrect and badly sourced information winds up in your file, and they spread it far and wide among your core business relationships, just try to collect damages.
Exactly how is funding a study that indicates you should do something healthy a complete and utter sham?
There are so many things wrong with this, I started by fixing the grammar, just so I could see the sky.
Exactly how is funding a study that indicates you should do something correlated with good health a complete and utter sham?
Sky, this is Horizon. Horizon, this is Sky.
Exactly how is funding a study that with a Dr Oz soundbite endorsing behaviours correlated with good health a complete and utter sham?
Sun, this is Moon. Moon, this is Sun.
Exactly how is funding a study with a design objective to achieve a Dr Oz soundbite endorsing behaviours correlated with good health a complete and utter sham?
Saskatchewan, this is Easter Island. Easter Island, this is Saskatchewan. _____
Easter Island: Wow! What a lot of dirt and grass!
Saskatchewan: Wow! What a lot of salt and water!
Easter Island: You can see miles and miles!
Saskatchewan: Do I have to climb this damn statue for a better view? You do know, I'm a little bit afraid of heights...
Easter Island: But you're 3000 feet higher up already!
Saskatchewan: Come to think of it, I did once climb to the top of a giant snow hummock behind the skating rink. You get much snow here? Maybe I'll just wait for winter, and then check out the 360 degree ocean observatory.
Easter Island: Well, there's always nuclear winter, but I don't think nuclear winter will improve the view.
This is so simply avoidable by simple basic hygiene.
You have a level of trust in "basic hygiene" that I simply don't share, and I can't even imagine how to conduct a study that would prove your thesis directly.
I bet even the most clinically extreme neat freak experiences an unwitting basic hygiene lapse at least once per week.
Everyone has probably heard stories (urban legends) about gaslighting high-strung couch potatoes with adjustable rabbit ears who are too addicted to sports or sitcoms for their own good.
(I once tried this on my younger siblings using an antique frequency generator wired to a small yagi under my bed—we lived on an isolated hilltop acreage—but it only caused minor snow and zigzag patterns, despite being just one room away; we generally had bad reception anyway, and they found the effect unremarkable.)
To be certain an effect is localized, you need to measure it in many places at the same time.
Otherwise, quite possibly, some asshole or algorithm merely has his/her/its hand on the dial.
Because we still can't define what intelligence is.
Just imagine what the human mind's distributed representation of the "intelligence" concept would look like. Clever animate entities (and most associations therewith) are way off in their own private corner of vector space compared to just about everything else.
When the gap is this large, the enormous void in between somehow becomes a non-object (to superficial cognition) and so people just begin to presume that we need to jump the gap, rather than slowly filling the gap in.
It's almost like the travelling moon illusion when you're driving in a car and the moon is low in the sky, off to the side (which children find amazing, but adults have learned to ignore).
I was thinking about the sun this morning and about relative illumination at different latitudes. The correct physical model is parallel rays, which immediately suggests that for a perfect sphere, the poles get no direct radiation at all during equinox, the eternal kiss of sunrise=sunset.
Then I looked outside through the window, and realized that the human brain—which knows the sun is far away—still doesn't think it's as far away as the earth is wide (very wide, if you believe in a flat earth model) or even a few multiples (but it's actually thousands), and so the intuition from our eyes never says parallel rays.
We've been nibbling away at the giant AI void quite successfully, but the travelling moon illusion still makes us think we need to jump.
The reason we keep reclassifying our victories as "not really AI" is because we know for a moon fact that the void never actually changes size. But it does, and it has, and it will continue to shrink, and I really don't think we're going to spring generalized intelligence all at once out of scary clown box.
First we must learn to perceive the void as a continuum of many way points, mapped out by many generations of technical improvement, like Vancouver and Cook or Lewis and Clark.
For me, recent results with LSTMs have made the void seem just a little bit smaller than it was before. I'm now at the very beginning of an ability to perceive the moon as being at a great, yet finite distance. _____
With something so thoroughly hived off in its own corner of distributed-representation hyperspace as intelligence, what's to define, anyway? Definitions are street signs erected in conurbia, which one resorts to after Toronto and Hamilton and Niagara Falls have all become built-structure indistinguishable as you skirt the horseshoe.
There are many conurbations in distributed-representation vector space where definitions are the last gasp at forestalling cognitive Gangs of New York. Definitions are less important under open skies of Boise, Idaho or Butte, Montana; even less important still when you've wandered out into the green grid-lines of the entirely unpainted Matrix.
Here's a quick test: if your frontier town's "population #,### sign" (there is only one sign) and it has at most one comma, definitions are premature.
The reason I wanted Kay to give an explicit answer about what Engelbart got right that HTML didn't is that I'm wary about these judgements in hindsight.
The article disappoints because the interviewer doesn't force Kay to explain what he thinks Engelbart got right that HTML didn't.
But it did have a few gems along the way.
Do you know how to do an undo on an iPhone? Let me ask you that question. I'll just test you out a little. Suppose you do something on the iPhone and you don't like it, how do you undo it? ... So, in theory, you're supposed to shake the iPhone and that means undo. Did you ever, did anybody ever tell you that? It's not on the website. It turns out almost no app responds to a shake. And there's no other provision. In fact, you can't even find out how to use the iPhone on the iPhone. You ever notice that? ... So, this is like less than what people got with Mac in 1984. Mac had a really good undo. It allowed you to explore things. Mac had multitasking. The iPhone is basically giving one little keyhole and if you do something wrong, you actually go back out and start the app over again.
Think about this. How stupid is this? It's about as stupid as you can get. But how successful is the iPhone? It's about as successful as you can get, so that matches you up with something that is the logical equivalent of television in our time.
As I read it, Turing's paper was entirely about hacking on humbug human attitudes: if flesh and metal both give the same answers (or similar enough that you can't tell the difference) isn't it a just distinction without a difference to describe one as alive and conscious and the other inanimate and unconscious?
This paper really had very little to do with computers at all.
Algorithms to Live By (2016) by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths
Bread Baker's Apprentice (2001) by Peter Reinhart
Fat Chance (2013) by Robert Lustig
The Hacking of the American Mind (2017) by Robert Lustig (on order)
Democracy to Live By (2016) by Christopher H. Achen
Taste of Persia (2016) by Naomi Duguid
Democracy is a textbook in drag, but has some worthwhile chapters near the end.
Taste of Persia is interesting, but this isn't the easiest cuisine to crack into. Managed a reasonable tahdig on my first attempt. I will probably try a flatbread, then call it a day for this pass. But the weird thing is, I'll probably use Reinhart's recipe, because his book has a good one, too.
Bread Baker's Apprentice is awesome. He adapted his Pain a l'Ancienne in a later book (the recipe is online), and I'm already getting amazing results (but I had been making high-hydration pizza dough for several years, so it wasn't the biggest stretch, har har).
Lustig has some interviews on YouTube. I like the guy, but he can lay it on a bit thick at times. He recently took time off from his medical research to pick up a law degree. Honestly not sure what to expect from his newest book.
I've long had a love/hate relationship with Pinker, but eventually I read everything he writes.
Algorithms to Live By would be a great book if they weren't so busy shooting down their own strawmen.
What's the real value of an "optimal" solution, as N races upward in a combinatorial space? First, it ends argument. Second, well, there is no second. So many good solutions are almost identical in many of these problem spaces at scale. Pssst—that's why there's no fucking gradient inside the good solution disk for your clever algorithm to exploit. Man that was getting on my nerves at various points. Then they get half of another chapter explaining that many optimum isn't necessary at the end of the day after all. Oh, sheesh. Why didn't you say this long before I threw the book at the wall for the third time?
A fairly typical random cross section, though a bit heavy on cooking lately.
The modern age of coffee-fueled offices is entirely a product of Maxwell House's 1950s advertising with the slogan, "Take a coffee break."
Folklore is a giant wax museum of intrepid historical figures flipping the bird to the domed dinosaur diorama while cracking open a champagne magnum against the nearest tree (do forgive my small anachronism) or throwing a giant streaming parade minutes before the world changed of its own accord by a rapid cascade of barely perceptible degrees (perspective: sweltering NBA reptile with small, sticky fingers) in the inexorable march of exploration, exploitation, and delinquency (subtypes: fungus, resin, coca, cocoa, coffee, erbium, tantalum, palladium, niobium).
Pournelle was extraordinarily intelligent. Many extraordinarily intelligent people learn early on that people who disagree with them are usually wrong, and for the sake of efficiency should be ignored or their arguments discarded without due consideration.
Mind blowing.
It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.
— Mark Twain
To begin with, I wouldn't bet my life that this quote originated from Twain (for that matter, I would be hard pressed to bet my life Twain ever said "Twain, Mark Twain") but let's ignore the ironic recursion.
The smarter you are, the more exposed you become to the final sliver of error.
And then, if you shut down the feedback loop of last resort in the name of efficiency then the final score is Hubris: 1, IQ: 0 for any value of IQ (which is anyway a set of measure zero, despite here and there a flirtation with numbers—180, 190, 200—that might almost boil water by sheer mental exertion).
How about we set Pournelle beside Pournelle squared?
According to E. Wigner and S. Ulam, von Neumann was an extremely open person. He was ready to help anyone who needed advice. His good sense of humor and remarkable gift of storytelling made him being adored even by strangers. He was never pompous, always driven by his flawless logic and very profound understanding of morality.
Despite his acknowledged outstanding intellectual capabilities, he was free from arrogance and he was very interested in other people.
According to Norbert Weiner:
Neumann is one of the two or three top mathematicians in the world, is totally without national or race prejudice, and has an enormously great gift for inspiring younger men and getting them to do research... Neumann is not high-hat in any way, and is most accessible to young students
I got that impression originally from a David Hoffman documentary (since taken down from YouTube), the above are similar sentiments recounted on Quora.
I was never a huge fan of Pournelle's fiction. Had it not been that Niven's Ringworld was somewhat thinly plotted—plot was always Niven's weak underbelly—I doubt their collaboration would have ever happened.
Niven with a thin plot was still ten times better mind food than anything Pournelle ever wrote.
For anyone mentioning that Ellison also had a prick gear, check out the documentary Dreams with Sharp Teeth (2008). He comes across as a bristly guy with a prick gear, but mostly tolerable the rest of the time.
If I had to choose one or the other to be stuck with on a destroyed island paradise, it would be prophetic Ellison over Pournelle all the way (though definitely Pournelle over oracular Ellison). At the end of the day, I did continue to read Pournelle's columns, something that can't be said for John C. Dvorak.
It will be very hard to top this. In this case we have half of a population with personal info detailed enough to effectively steal identity in multiple ways...
Hackers aren't stealing identity, they are stealing credentials (so as so assume an identity, if the world makes this easy for them to pull off).
Institutions want to pretend that credentials = identity, so that if they give your money to the wrong person, it's your fault (your identity was stolen, what else could we do?) rather than their fault (their chosen system of credentials sprung a leak, causing them to misidentify some loser as the real customer).
Finally, a big enough leak that maybe some people will begin to comprehend the distinction here.
Slashdot mainly serves to keep my severed finger wet.
Doh!
Somewhere inside I just knew I was one word away from the perfect ending. I stared and stared at the video replay until I finally got it. Damn. Two beautiful bumps from Chomsky and Harris, and then I flubbed the spike.
And no, it wasn't an accident that team Chomsky, Harris and Will were lined up against Hannity, Limbaugh, and Carlson—those shrill wind-up drawls that blow nobody good—(Frum Jr. must then, perforce, be the odd-man-out stripe-swapping zebra).
You can bet team CHILL has a frostier bench—true meteorology is rarely a pleasant lark on a bark through a park (Houston, we're short of birch slabs).
There are many places on the Internet where I stick a wet finger in the air, to assess weather conditions.
Where I "get" my meteorology is from professionals over a broad spectrum (I actually prefer Chris Wallace and Shepard Smith over Joe and Mika when Chris and Shep are taking their jobs seriously). And then I often cross-check the professionals against Wikipedia (mostly for leaving important shit out) and Google Scholar (for careful treatment of what they chose to include).
Where it comes to meteorology, half of these social media bumpkins couldn't even write down the ideal gas law (though for many, it's surely Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson in a perfect storm of Hurricane Beangeflato).
For me, the continental divide—between swamp and non-swamp—is approximately George Will: I find myself on board with exactly half of what he says. David Frum is also a fairly reliable coin flip: I just never know if I'm going to agree or not, sentence by sentence.
By way of contrast, I only agree with about 1/3 of what Chomsky says, though it's a pretty important one third. From time to time I nail myself to a cross and drink his vinegar (no, I'm not self-aggrandising—this was, for the most part, a thoroughly plebeian pastime in ancient Rome).
By way of contrast again, I agree with Sam Harris 75% of the time, but it's the least important 75%, so I pretty much stopped tuning him in.
Slashdot Mirror
Giving kickbacks is twice the crime.
There seems to be this strange sentiment in modern America that given any illicit transaction between two parties, figure out who has less power, and throw that bastard in jail.
Seems backwards to me.
Sure if you want to make street walking illegal, lock up the prostitutes. But if you really want to make prostitution illegal, lock up the Johns—all the bankers, and bakers, and candlestick makers.
Same goes for the drug trade. Lock up the Hollywood celebrities who toss largess into the welcoming arms of Central Casting's dark corridor of thugs.
And while we're at it, lock up the California fruit farmers who pay Mexicans (for generations at a time) who don't have legal work permits.
Many problems, one solution.
First of all, this guy is flipping the bird at the uncanny valley with a big FU to the UV.
He's good, and he knows it.
Second, this project requires an enormous amount of experimental interaction time with the simulated being, and humans are programmed to tolerate fragmentary interactions with babies (subtype: who mainly speak only when spoken to) for a lot longer than dealing with the cognition-limited adult sitting next to you on the airplane.
Third, it's for the same reason that artists practice on "natural" models. If you're good, you want to heighten critique, and not run away at the first sign of an uphill gradient.
I've always regarded the UV as overrated. It's nought but craggy gully that separates the boys from the sheep. (Separating the men from the boys is a further challenge, long after the UV is well and truly in your RV mirror.)
Added phrase:
The purpose of this, aside from the humorous time travel, is to highlight that mass production is at root a social technology and was largely inherent in the invention of the city right from the get go.
What differentiated modern mass production was people becoming entirely captive to their specialization, such that even finding a second factory anywhere in the nearby territory in need of precisely the same skill would often prove daunting (early water-powered textile mills typically had unique equipment and did not have standardized roles—that came much later).
It was a whole new form of risky subservience, not so different from adopting agriculture, or fiat currency.
Or even more scary, fiatless currency, based on blockchains.
I usually lump "fire" under exodigestion: the use of the external environment to predigest food, enabling disproportionate enlargement of the glucose-glutton human brain compared to the gut.
This category also includes fermentation and milling and other early "processed" foods obtained through the clever use of sticks (ultimately, pointy sticks) and rocks (ultimately, sharp rocks). One of the uses of food is to maintain body temperature, so fire gets a gold star compared to all the others, but still, it's the same thing.
Plumbing pretty much derives from metal casting (as does movable type), it just took a long time from the invention of the first lead pipes to reach the average residence.
What fully set this in motion was the germ theory of disease. If you want to split this off from metal casting, I would nominate the entire panoply of microbial hygiene (which treads on fermentation again, but with renewed vigour; and fire again, though smoke; and pretty much every other mode of food preservation).
Talk about plumbing taking a long time, it's only since 2000 that we've fully acknowledged the importance of the human microbiome (a mere 300 years after the first high-powered microscope, and 1900 years after Seneca first described magnification through shaped glass—glass itself being newly invented; having noted this point, it becomes almost impossible to leave various modes of exoperceptual enhancement off the list, as well).
At the apex of exodigestion and hygiene, refrigeration can reasonably be lumped under electrification, which absolutely can not be left off any such list.
Neither would I leave off syntactic communication (human language might have started off with complex hand signals used on the hunt, before syntax became oral) or man's best friend, domestication: anyone who thought the horse—properly tacked—wasn't disruptive never met the Mongols.
I would also be reluctant to leave off trade and mechanization (e.g. the cotton gin) and mass production from even the shortest list.
But of course this is a fractal, and you can come up with representative lumps at all scales.
____
What's actually going on with modern SV disruption porn is that it has become a way to communicate to investors that your play is all about going yard (taking a big, risky swing) rather than settling for a base hit (most nervous and risk-averse entrepreneurs are thrilled to score a base hit, but it leaves the moneybag with no immediate exit strategy, and he or she can become stuck watching the entire nickel and dime Moneyball operation eek out a slow win, while all the windfall profits drain away into actual salary).
A hundred PhD students could write their theses on the venture capital language dance and barely scratch the surface.
The poor sod in the middle—some milk of magnesia chugging Richard Hendricks—ends up trying to project Godel, Escher, Bach shadow bunnies in three simultaneous dimensions, for three different audiences (VC, employees, consumer).
The "merits of the algorithm" is communally undefined if the design party is keeping secret the existence of differential cryptography—or any other advanced mode of attack—as IBM and the NSA once did with the DES. It was pretty clear that something fishy had gone into the design of the S-boxes. Whether fair or foul is impossible to decide when you're on the outside looking in (turns out, for DES, it was fair—foul play was confined to mandating a short key length).
What people don't understand is that as much as the Americans would like to read everyone else's traffic, it's far worse if any backdoor leaked to an adversary (your whole financial system is protected by these codes), so they were sensibly reluctant to put one in—until they invented the one-way back door, where only the designers could ever know. Unable to resist the siren call of this new brass ring, the NSA immediately blew their entire history of trust (which had always been more out of enlightened self-interest than gentlemanly) into a giant mushroom cloud.
It remains difficult to decide whether "merit" can be debated in these matters on a level playing field.
On the other side of the coin, while I'm far from a serious cryptographer, Specks' ARX design does not appear to leave many places for newly discovered snookery to hide itself.
That said, banning the runt versions smells like prudence to me, as any covert American attack is probably a combination of a downgrade attack—tricking a cipher to operate at less than full strength (world and dog are not freaking out over the Intel Management Engine for no reason)—perhaps injecting some known plaintext, finished off with a giant can of precomputed whup ass (the mechanism of attack one can best keep confined to your side of the fight is a multimodal attack).
Once you take the downgrade attacks off the table, it's a lot easier to swallow the inequitable debate on merit as a pure cipher.
Not buying it. I really don't see how you performed that neat dissection of history from technology from capabilities, without the use of a white glove and a black hat.
____
Addendum:
Researchers Find a Way to Disable Much-Hated Intel ME Component Courtesy of the NSA — 28 August 2017
True to form, the NSA's greatest terror is being hoist by their own petard.
They don't advertise this fear, because they prefer to viewed through the do-unto-others side of the lens. Trying to turn these weapons into technological diodes is an enormous practical constraint.
That, and resource saturation (what they can do and what they can afford to do are two different beasts) are in my experience the only reliable external vantage points for 99.999999% of the planet's population incapable of wading into the merit debate at anywhere near eye level.
This leads me to wonder what theories of cloud mind have been constructed out there by people unfamiliar with buffer bloat.
Some of the qualms and presumptions must be truly staggering.
Talk about low aim steering.
These credit agencies have special legal exemptions from slander and liability law. If incorrect and badly sourced information winds up in your file, and they spread it far and wide among your core business relationships, just try to collect damages.
Heads deserve to roll, and none have.
Wait just a second here. Are miniskirts back in fashion again and I missed it?
Some fashions, like the abrupt dawn of eternal September and bell bottom jeans you figure are a once-in-a-lifetime freak event.
But no, eternal September is baaaaack.
Dialogue with the governed: cronyism.
Failure to dialogue with the governed: deep state.
Heads I win, tails you lose.
Not quite eternal September, but close, yet for some reason we seem to have skipped a month.
Now, I need to run outside immediately and check me out some bell-bottomed miniskirts.
There are so many things wrong with this, I started by fixing the grammar, just so I could see the sky.
Sky, this is Horizon. Horizon, this is Sky.
Sun, this is Moon. Moon, this is Sun.
Saskatchewan, this is Easter Island. Easter Island, this is Saskatchewan.
_____
Easter Island: Wow! What a lot of dirt and grass!
Saskatchewan: Wow! What a lot of salt and water!
Easter Island: You can see miles and miles!
Saskatchewan: Do I have to climb this damn statue for a better view? You do know, I'm a little bit afraid of heights ...
Easter Island: But you're 3000 feet higher up already!
Saskatchewan: Come to think of it, I did once climb to the top of a giant snow hummock behind the skating rink. You get much snow here? Maybe I'll just wait for winter, and then check out the 360 degree ocean observatory.
Easter Island: Well, there's always nuclear winter, but I don't think nuclear winter will improve the view.
You have a level of trust in "basic hygiene" that I simply don't share, and I can't even imagine how to conduct a study that would prove your thesis directly.
I bet even the most clinically extreme neat freak experiences an unwitting basic hygiene lapse at least once per week.
Everyone has probably heard stories (urban legends) about gaslighting high-strung couch potatoes with adjustable rabbit ears who are too addicted to sports or sitcoms for their own good.
(I once tried this on my younger siblings using an antique frequency generator wired to a small yagi under my bed—we lived on an isolated hilltop acreage—but it only caused minor snow and zigzag patterns, despite being just one room away; we generally had bad reception anyway, and they found the effect unremarkable.)
To be certain an effect is localized, you need to measure it in many places at the same time.
Otherwise, quite possibly, some asshole or algorithm merely has his/her/its hand on the dial.
Just imagine what the human mind's distributed representation of the "intelligence" concept would look like. Clever animate entities (and most associations therewith) are way off in their own private corner of vector space compared to just about everything else.
When the gap is this large, the enormous void in between somehow becomes a non-object (to superficial cognition) and so people just begin to presume that we need to jump the gap, rather than slowly filling the gap in.
It's almost like the travelling moon illusion when you're driving in a car and the moon is low in the sky, off to the side (which children find amazing, but adults have learned to ignore).
I was thinking about the sun this morning and about relative illumination at different latitudes. The correct physical model is parallel rays, which immediately suggests that for a perfect sphere, the poles get no direct radiation at all during equinox, the eternal kiss of sunrise=sunset.
Then I looked outside through the window, and realized that the human brain—which knows the sun is far away—still doesn't think it's as far away as the earth is wide (very wide, if you believe in a flat earth model) or even a few multiples (but it's actually thousands), and so the intuition from our eyes never says parallel rays.
We've been nibbling away at the giant AI void quite successfully, but the travelling moon illusion still makes us think we need to jump.
The reason we keep reclassifying our victories as "not really AI" is because we know for a moon fact that the void never actually changes size. But it does, and it has, and it will continue to shrink, and I really don't think we're going to spring generalized intelligence all at once out of scary clown box.
First we must learn to perceive the void as a continuum of many way points, mapped out by many generations of technical improvement, like Vancouver and Cook or Lewis and Clark.
For me, recent results with LSTMs have made the void seem just a little bit smaller than it was before. I'm now at the very beginning of an ability to perceive the moon as being at a great, yet finite distance.
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With something so thoroughly hived off in its own corner of distributed-representation hyperspace as intelligence, what's to define, anyway? Definitions are street signs erected in conurbia, which one resorts to after Toronto and Hamilton and Niagara Falls have all become built-structure indistinguishable as you skirt the horseshoe.
There are many conurbations in distributed-representation vector space where definitions are the last gasp at forestalling cognitive Gangs of New York. Definitions are less important under open skies of Boise, Idaho or Butte, Montana; even less important still when you've wandered out into the green grid-lines of the entirely unpainted Matrix.
Here's a quick test: if your frontier town's "population #,### sign" (there is only one sign) and it has at most one comma, definitions are premature.
I get so tired of this meme parading as fresh insight.
$silver_bullet is always five years off.
See, if you say ten years, no-one pays attention because ten years is a long ways away and you've already lost the attention war.
If you say two years, some well-informed wise ass will probably start to make irritating (and accurate) observations based on proximate data.
But five years is the Goldilocks condition: just right.
Most of the time you can cut to the chase and simply s/silver_bullet/juvenile_wish_fulfillment/g FTW.
The reason I wanted Kay to give an explicit answer about what Engelbart got right that HTML didn't is that I'm wary about these judgements in hindsight.
I was reading Rob Pike this morning.
Go at Google: Language Design in the Service of Software Engineering — 2012
Would s/Go/HTML/g be a correct map for Kay's opinion? Because HTML really was designed more for engineering at scale than anything else.
And this always draws a chorus of criticism from the conceptual purity boo birds.
Kay is a pretty smart guy, but did he ever learn his billion times tables really? I rather suspect that was never native to his cognitive style.
The article disappoints because the interviewer doesn't force Kay to explain what he thinks Engelbart got right that HTML didn't.
But it did have a few gems along the way.
As I read it, Turing's paper was entirely about hacking on humbug human attitudes: if flesh and metal both give the same answers (or similar enough that you can't tell the difference) isn't it a just distinction without a difference to describe one as alive and conscious and the other inanimate and unconscious?
This paper really had very little to do with computers at all.
chmod -R 666 soul
make -j 666
Oops, typo! Meant to type "6", but force of habit (and too much Red Bull). Unfortunately, so many processes spawned, didn't see the ledge.
Arrrrrrrrrrrrr—
Democracy for Realists
Cut and paste error.
also s/many optimum/maybe optimum
Democracy is a textbook in drag, but has some worthwhile chapters near the end.
Taste of Persia is interesting, but this isn't the easiest cuisine to crack into. Managed a reasonable tahdig on my first attempt. I will probably try a flatbread, then call it a day for this pass. But the weird thing is, I'll probably use Reinhart's recipe, because his book has a good one, too.
Bread Baker's Apprentice is awesome. He adapted his Pain a l'Ancienne in a later book (the recipe is online), and I'm already getting amazing results (but I had been making high-hydration pizza dough for several years, so it wasn't the biggest stretch, har har).
Lustig has some interviews on YouTube. I like the guy, but he can lay it on a bit thick at times. He recently took time off from his medical research to pick up a law degree. Honestly not sure what to expect from his newest book.
I've long had a love/hate relationship with Pinker, but eventually I read everything he writes.
Algorithms to Live By would be a great book if they weren't so busy shooting down their own strawmen.
What's the real value of an "optimal" solution, as N races upward in a combinatorial space? First, it ends argument. Second, well, there is no second. So many good solutions are almost identical in many of these problem spaces at scale. Pssst—that's why there's no fucking gradient inside the good solution disk for your clever algorithm to exploit. Man that was getting on my nerves at various points. Then they get half of another chapter explaining that many optimum isn't necessary at the end of the day after all. Oh, sheesh. Why didn't you say this long before I threw the book at the wall for the third time?
A fairly typical random cross section, though a bit heavy on cooking lately.
Regular pipe maintenance is also associated with a decrease in all-cause male mortality.
Way up in the sky /
Puzzling to my tiny eye /
Ablation of my risk to die.
Only now I ponder why /
Lofting spunk lifeboats spry.
Also, be sure to order the self-winding activity tracker rather than the regular coin cell job—unless you're a dab hand with small tools.
Folklore is a giant wax museum of intrepid historical figures flipping the bird to the domed dinosaur diorama while cracking open a champagne magnum against the nearest tree (do forgive my small anachronism) or throwing a giant streaming parade minutes before the world changed of its own accord by a rapid cascade of barely perceptible degrees (perspective: sweltering NBA reptile with small, sticky fingers) in the inexorable march of exploration, exploitation, and delinquency (subtypes: fungus, resin, coca, cocoa, coffee, erbium, tantalum, palladium, niobium).
Mind blowing.
To begin with, I wouldn't bet my life that this quote originated from Twain (for that matter, I would be hard pressed to bet my life Twain ever said "Twain, Mark Twain") but let's ignore the ironic recursion.
The smarter you are, the more exposed you become to the final sliver of error.
And then, if you shut down the feedback loop of last resort in the name of efficiency then the final score is Hubris: 1, IQ: 0 for any value of IQ (which is anyway a set of measure zero, despite here and there a flirtation with numbers—180, 190, 200—that might almost boil water by sheer mental exertion).
How about we set Pournelle beside Pournelle squared?
According to Norbert Weiner:
I got that impression originally from a David Hoffman documentary (since taken down from YouTube), the above are similar sentiments recounted on Quora.
I was never a huge fan of Pournelle's fiction. Had it not been that Niven's Ringworld was somewhat thinly plotted—plot was always Niven's weak underbelly—I doubt their collaboration would have ever happened.
Niven with a thin plot was still ten times better mind food than anything Pournelle ever wrote.
For anyone mentioning that Ellison also had a prick gear, check out the documentary Dreams with Sharp Teeth (2008). He comes across as a bristly guy with a prick gear, but mostly tolerable the rest of the time.
If I had to choose one or the other to be stuck with on a destroyed island paradise, it would be prophetic Ellison over Pournelle all the way (though definitely Pournelle over oracular Ellison). At the end of the day, I did continue to read Pournelle's columns, something that can't be said for John C. Dvorak.
Hackers aren't stealing identity, they are stealing credentials (so as so assume an identity, if the world makes this easy for them to pull off).
Institutions want to pretend that credentials = identity, so that if they give your money to the wrong person, it's your fault (your identity was stolen, what else could we do?) rather than their fault (their chosen system of credentials sprung a leak, causing them to misidentify some loser as the real customer).
Finally, a big enough leak that maybe some people will begin to comprehend the distinction here.
Slashdot mainly serves to keep my severed finger wet.
Doh!
Somewhere inside I just knew I was one word away from the perfect ending. I stared and stared at the video replay until I finally got it. Damn. Two beautiful bumps from Chomsky and Harris, and then I flubbed the spike.
And no, it wasn't an accident that team Chomsky, Harris and Will were lined up against Hannity, Limbaugh, and Carlson—those shrill wind-up drawls that blow nobody good—(Frum Jr. must then, perforce, be the odd-man-out stripe-swapping zebra).
You can bet team CHILL has a frostier bench—true meteorology is rarely a pleasant lark on a bark through a park (Houston, we're short of birch slabs).
There are many places on the Internet where I stick a wet finger in the air, to assess weather conditions.
Where I "get" my meteorology is from professionals over a broad spectrum (I actually prefer Chris Wallace and Shepard Smith over Joe and Mika when Chris and Shep are taking their jobs seriously). And then I often cross-check the professionals against Wikipedia (mostly for leaving important shit out) and Google Scholar (for careful treatment of what they chose to include).
Where it comes to meteorology, half of these social media bumpkins couldn't even write down the ideal gas law (though for many, it's surely Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson in a perfect storm of Hurricane Beangeflato).
For me, the continental divide—between swamp and non-swamp—is approximately George Will: I find myself on board with exactly half of what he says. David Frum is also a fairly reliable coin flip: I just never know if I'm going to agree or not, sentence by sentence.
By way of contrast, I only agree with about 1/3 of what Chomsky says, though it's a pretty important one third. From time to time I nail myself to a cross and drink his vinegar (no, I'm not self-aggrandising—this was, for the most part, a thoroughly plebeian pastime in ancient Rome).
By way of contrast again, I agree with Sam Harris 75% of the time, but it's the least important 75%, so I pretty much stopped tuning him in.
Slashdot mainly serves to keep my finger wet.