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You sound successful relative to where you could have ended up.

I was in Jutland, in Northwest Denmark recently, and the backstory of that place is that a thousand years ago it was covered in thick pine forest. Medieval people cut the trees down for firewood and agriculture, which led to an ecological disaster from erosion that covered entire farms and villages in sand. Hundreds of years later, at the beginning of the 20th century, however, people started replanting forests and have had success in mitigating a lot of the erosion.

Now, knowing that the line between man and other animals is totally arbitrary, we should be fine to retell that story with beavers instead of people, right?

(I won't even get into how I flew there at 1000kph in a giant metal vehicle and carried a universal translator in my pocket, also neither of which were made by beavers.)

Not sure I'm totally understanding here, but it sounds like LinkedIn turned on (probably AI-based) porn scanning on messages, there was a false positive, and the guy wasn't able to escalate to support. Is there an implication that it was blocked for political reasons?

I apologize, but I'm trying to parse what you're saying and I can't seem to find the meat. I understand you're trying to insult me or whatever, but are you trying to say anything relevant to the topic?

I don't think I actually asserted anything, but let me give a shot at explaining:

The model is that higher values of G/B are better, where G is good years per capita and B is bad years per capita, so the ethical thing to do is maximize G and/or minimize B. I called this "basic" because even though it tends to fall apart when scaled up, I think it captures what most people think of ethics. It's good for making tactical decisions about things like "should I punch that guy" or whatever.

For #1, where ethics would be just a fiction we made up to support a social game, what I mean is: People in a group have to play a prisoners' dilemma game where they find a balance of cooperation and sharing of resources. One way to reach that balance is to assume good will and treat others like you want to be treated. (Right up until someone violates that, then it's hyperbolic response time...) If ethics is just something people made up to get everyone to maintain that balance, then higher G/B being better is rooted in the same fiction.

For #2: My definition of G and B included good and bad experiences by animals, not just people. That means it's possible that over a billion years or so you could still achieve higher G/B by going back to a "natural" world inhabited by sentient but less intelligent animals.

For #3: It could be that the G/B in a natural world would actually be lower than if it was dominated by humans, because several billion people being able to live out their lives before the crash could result in a big enough G value to outweigh the eventual suffering.

For #4: If life as a human counted more towards G than the same amount of life as a beaver, then it could be a force multiplier for #3.

Do you have another model that changes the answers?

I'm on the fence about whether I agree with this. The way I see it, if you look at beavers, ants, or trees, they change the landscape but they do it based on behaviors that are encoded in their genes. That means a beaver can create a lake, but its descendants have to be able to live with that using the same slow-changing genetic programming, otherwise they die off. With humans, we can adapt new ways to live in the altered environment, even if it would have been incompatible with the lives of our ancestors. If we kill off all the salmon and whales, for example, within a generation or two we can pivot to factory-farmed chicken and petroleum. Once we've tapped that out we can do soy protein and windfarms.

I say I'm on the fence because on a longer time scale, that kind of mental adaptation might not be that much different from genetic adaptation and we'll still have to find equilibrium or die out.

As far as the ethics question goes, if we use the most basic model and say that the ethical thing is that which promotes the most "good-life-years per capita" versus "bad-life-years per capita", where capita means one of the sentient residents of the planet, there are a few ways to look at it:

1. Ethics is just a fiction that humans have made up to support the prisoners' dilemma style of cooperation game we play, and there's no real answer.

2. The billon or two twilight years of our planet are better spent in rough equilibrium, where tigers exist, but most animals get some time to stretch in the sun, nuzzle their young, etc.

3. Life in equilibrium is actually cold, brutal, and short for most of the sentient animals involved, so providing a higher level of comfort for a population of ten billion people is better, even if it eventually crashes.

4. The experience of a human counts more than that of an animal, so a high human population with a decent standard of living for a long enough time pushes the needle past what a much longer natural equilibrium would achieve.

The entire system has been acting as if GenAI was right around the corner.

To be clear, I think it is. It's just not going to be a hologram of a wizard in a room you can ask a question to for a quarter, which is what these chat bots and copilots you see today are modeled around.

There was a movie that came out in 2001 called "Artificial Intelligence", at a time when we were still figuring out how things like search engines and the online economy were going to work. It had a scene where the main characters went to a city and visited a pay-per-question AI oracle. It was very artistically done, but it really revealed (in hindsight) how naive we were about how "online" was going to turn out.

When I look at the kinds of AI projects I have visibility into, there's a parallel where the public are expecting a centralized, all knowing, general purpose AI, but what it's really going to look like is a graph of oddball AI agents tuned for different optimizations.

One node might be slow and expensive but able to infer intent from a document, but its input is filtered by a fast and cheap one that eliminates uninteresting content, and it could offload work to a domain-specific one that knows everything about URLs, for example. More like the network of small, specialized computers scattered around your car than a central know-it-all computer.

I've heard people say that, but the SSA's FAQ says otherwise:

"Q20: Are Social Security numbers reused after a person dies?

A: No. We do not reassign a Social Security number (SSN) after the number holder's death."

https://www.ssa.gov/history/hfaq.html

I googled that recently, and it sounds like:

They don't get reused.

There are about 70 years left.

The government is punting the problem to future people and there's no solution yet.

That's good to know - thanks! My astigmatism one is definitely special, because it takes an extra two or three weeks to get it from Costco, but I didn't know there was an orientation mark on it. I'll take a look.

I wear soft contacts and one of my eyes has astigmatism. I've never understood how a symmetrical lens can correct an asymmetrical eyeball. Another strange thing I've seen is that after having put these things in my eyes about 2000 times at this point, I think I can tell that they vary in thickness, sometimes even in the same pack, but it doesn't seem to affect their performance. It all seems a little magical, so I guess I should find some time and go down the youtube rabbit hole that probably exists.

If you ever get a chance to play with a magnet fishing magnet, it's fun to see how many straight-up magnetic rocks there are lying around, too. Probably not meteorites of course...

I think the answer is that much like an ad for a car or a mattress, the cold call isn't meant to take someone from zero to full interest, it's to find that one person in a hundred who's already thinking about it and just needs an opportunity presented to them.

How many random people would you need to ask before you found someone who was pondering joining a gym this very morning and would love some more info about it?

It's minimalist because if the system is unstable you don't want to have to do anything fancy like open a window or look up a bunch of localized resources, as those could run into the same corruption that led to the initial problem.

The crabs analogy isn't a good one, because they evolve independently to play well in a common environment. GNU/Linux is a rewrite of Unix that avoids the licensing and hardware baggage that kept Unix out of reach of non-enterprise users in the 80s and early 90s.

Part of the gap that still exists is cost. A cloud service that isn't constrained by your local resources can do more as far as password cracking or applying AI to the password protected document/container problem, but we're not at a point where they're going to apply that to every hotmail or gmail account for free.

Writing your own simple programs and debugging/disassembling them is a solid option. Windbg and Ida are good tools to start with. Reading a disassembly is a lot easier than coding in assembly, and once you know what things like function calls and switch statements, etc. look like you can get a feel for what the original program was doing.

When notepad hits an unhandled exception and the OS decides it's in an unpredictable state, the OS shuts down notepad's process. When there's an unhandled exception in kernel mode, the OS shuts down the entire computer. That's a BSOD in Windows or a kernel panic in Linux. The problem isn't that CrowdStrike is a normal user mode application that is taking down Windows because Windows just lets that happen, it's that CrowdStrike has faulty code that runs in kernel mode. This isn't unique to Windows or Linux.

The main reason they need to run in kernel mode is you can't do behavior monitoring hooks in user mode without making your security tool open to detection and evasion. For example, if your security tool wants to detect whenever a process calls ShellExecute, you can inject a DLL into the process that hooks the ShellExecute API, but malware can just check for that in its own process and either work around it or refuse to run. That means the hook needs to be in kernel mode, or the OS needs to provide instrumentation that allows third party code to monitor calls like that without running in kernel mode.

IMO, Windows (and probably any OS you're likely to encounter in the wild) could do better providing that kind of instrumentation. Windows and Office have made progress in the last several years with things like enabling monitoring of PowerShell and VBA script block execution, but it's not enough that solutions like CrowdStrike can do their thing without going low level.

Beyond that, there's also going to be a huge latency between when a security researcher finds a new technique for creating processes, doing persistence, or whatever and when the engineering team for an OS can update their instrumentation to support detecting it, so there's always going to be some need for a presence in kernel mode if you want up to date protection.

That one's kind of come full circle, though, since a "photo shop" was a place you could go to get photos printed, altered, etc. since the late 1800s.

Go back a couple of years and the BBS scene was that times ten. Imagine if everyone in this thread lived within 20 minutes drive of each other, knew each other's real names, and might even recognize each other if they passed on the street. Anyone else feeling too much CRT today? Want to go throw a frisbee around?

IMO, the thing that went wrong with Lync->SFB transition was they bought Skype based on the idea that they could do something to merge the code with Lync, but over a year or two found out that that the only value was in the Skype branding, and the code and architecture of it was a dumpster fire. While the whole org was distracted by that, Teams came along and showed them what a rewrite from the ground up could do.

A highlight of the sale is a computer which Allen helped restore and on which he worked, a DEC PDP-10: KI-10. Built in 1971, it’s the first computer that both Allen and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates ever used prior to founding Microsoft. It’s estimated to fetch $30,000 to $50,000.

What? I know lots of people who would save them the trouble and buy it now for $50K. How bad of an investment could that be?

Edit: I'm picturing something large refrigerator sized like the PDP-8 at RePC down the street. If it's cheap because it's a 20-ton white elephant that's a different story.

Before the internet everything happened in periods of seven years. All the cells in your body would be replaced, your luck would recover from a broken mirror, the bankers would discharge your debt, and missing people would finally be declared dead. It was a much more elegant system than we have today.

Edit: And of course, the seven year itch.

Interesting that the words acute and obtuse seem to follow the same pattern. Etymology says they come from ancient words for needle and club. Which also follow the same pattern.

Getting rid of the external gears also allows you to use a fixed chain guard. Less pants with a hole chewed in one leg = profit.

I once had the romantic idea of making beer from a 200 year old recipe. Didn't get too far with it, but I recall one of the pieces of advice being not to let your horse stop walking while it's stomping the grain from the chaff, because it will urinate and ruin your ingredients. Also no mention of yeast - I guess you just took it on faith that fermentation would start if you kept it wet and warm.

Obviously a far younger city, but when I moved to seattle, satellite view on maps was just starting to be a thing, and you could spot all of the areas that were interesting to go to versus residential neighborhoods by the way the light reflected off the roofs. Lighter color along a street usually meant older, flat-roofed buildings where the market streets of the original towns were.

I agree - I've travelled enough on my own dime and the corporate one to know that you definitely don't want to get the cheapest room on Expedia, but satisfaction doesn't scale linearly with the amount you spend. Filet mignon doesn't automatically beat a nice warm rock to sit on.