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Gnewt

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UW computer science major. I make stuff in my free time, mostly in Python but with a bit of C, C#, JavaScript, and a few others sprinkled in. Security hobbyist.

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I had an affected YubiKey -- Yubico shipped out a replacement immediately. It's inconvenient if you have an old YubiKey, but the replacement process is simple.

Additionally, you can always generate GPG keys on your machine, transfer them to the YubiKey, and then delete the keys from the local machine. It depends if that's an acceptable exposure for your threat model, but for me, having the keys locally for a couple minutes is fine.

You place full trust in the provider of your VPN. If you'd like to use PIA, you have to trust them -- and you can make your own decisions about that. I think it's fairly reasonable to trust them based on available evidence, but it really depends on your threat model.

It depends on your threat model. If you want anonymity, you'll have to take further steps. Self-hosting on a VPS that's linked to you protects you only from your ISP, which is enough if you're concerned about your ISP selling your traffic data. Of course, you'll need to trust your VPS' outbound ISP... but I think it's fairly reasonable to assume that consumer ISPs are more likely to sell your data than larger providers.

I wonder if you might be approaching the problem from the wrong direction. In all likelihood, you're not going to make any grave mistakes -- you're just going to make food slightly below par a couple times until you hone in your cooking skills. It's probably worth practicing cooking some simple meals until that sense of paranoia diminishes rather than trying to cater to it.

(I honestly used to avoid cooking because I wasn't good at it -- the only thing to "fix" that was to start cooking, and now I feel comfortable with it and cook all the time)

John Glenn has died 10 years ago

For me, it's a joy to hear people talk about the things they are passionate about. I go out of my way to ask people to just talk about the things that interest them. I would be surprised if a majority of HN users did not have similar feelings.

Another commenter linked to the Wikipedia article on Bicameralism. If you're interested, you might want to check out "The Origin Of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"[0] by Julian Jaynes. The jury is (mostly?) still out on whether or not Jaynes is a quack, but he asserts that humans used to be unconscious, bicameral beings who "heard" voices in their heads that would direct them to do things. I put "heard" in quotes because Jaynes thinks the entirely process was fully unconscious (in terms of the subjective consciousness we experience), but that as consciousness developed, people literally heard voices in their heads for a long time.

Socrates' voice absolutely reminds me of this. Jaynes thinks that the first "conscious" humans literally heard the "voices of gods" and that we eventually evolved to lose that as subjective consciousness took over performing the same function.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B009MBTRHA/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

I used to be fond of trying out new desktop environments, playing with "fun" stuff etc. At this point in my life I no longer gain a lot of enjoyment from just fiddling around (at least not usually). These days a laptop is just a tool -- and ideally, one that works efficiently so I can do the work I need to do and get on with my life.

The reason I've used a MacBook Pro for so many years is because it really does "just work," or at least consistently has in the past. It's very, very rare (in my personal experience) to run into any system-related issues. I used to run Linux on a laptop and spent ages fiddling around with my Xorg, troubleshooting wireless issues, dealing with buggy desktop environments, etc...

I think a lot of other people are in a similar position, in that the "neat things" and "fiddling" are a negative. I just want a machine that works well with minimal configuration. Is desktop Linux at that stage right now? Popular opinion seems to say no, but I haven't actually tried running desktop Linux since for years.

(I do use Linux every single day, but it's always over ssh/tmux)

Of course. The whole points of a) the bill of rights and b) the entire system of checks and balances is to make things more "difficult". This is as the framers intended, explicitly to avoid things like judicial overreach as is happening in the iPhone case.

The "inefficiency" caused by the system of checks and balances is by design... sort of like a delay after the entry of an incorrect password.

In the opposite direction, having knowledge of Python's list comprehensions (and to some degree, an understanding of lazy evaluation) helped me a ton when set-builder notation was introduced in my first discrete math class.

I mean, it's an assumption that's got some known counterexamples. For example, Google Now stores the raw audio from every time you activate it / dictate a question on an Android device. It's not out of the question to expect that Facebook might be keeping raw audio data to process later / test.

I think I can shed a little light on that distinction -- here's how I understand it. No serious formal study here, but a few classes and a lot of reading of Hindu texts under my belt:

The human "Self" -- capital S -- generally refers to Atman. Atman is a "shard" of Brahman. So Self does denote Brahman, but with the tacit understanding that Atman is itself composed of Brahman, like a small patch of a flowing stream. It's not its own separate entity, but rather a piece of the whole that is also representative of the whole (look up "Tat Tvam Asi" for more on this concept).

The self -- lowercase s -- is generally used to refer to the dual self that humans have: Atman and Jiva. The Atman is the Self as we discussed before (but the Self is also the divine, as Krishna claims throughout the Gita). The Jiva, however, is the discrete part of the self -- the ego, all wants/desires, attachments to sense-objects and the physical world. When in casual conversation we discuss ourselves, a Hindu would likely claim that we are in fact discussing the Jiva.

I fully agree that meditation is less complicated than advertised. However I'd like to state that "contemplation" and "deep thought" are alternative terms for a specific type of meditation called mindfulness meditation: "the intentional, accepting and non-judgmental focus of one's attention on the emotions, thoughts and sensations occurring in the present moment."

When I meditate, my goal is not actually to contemplate anything at all -- it is to clear my mind, whittle my senses down until the only thing I feel is consciousness. Ultimately, in a state of deep meditation, my goal is a fully blank state, in which I'm doing nothing except existing.

I find that this helps me tremendously in my mindfulness in normal life, but I don't attempt to be mindful _during_ meditation in the same way.

GNU RCS 5.9.2 13 years ago

I use etckeeper, which is basically the same thing except with some nice hooks like auto-commit on apt-get install.