batz

Train horses, perhaps at a reclaimed monastery that runs silent and teaching retreats for guests who study math, classical philosophy, and martial arts.

Maybe start a barbell gym.

Their best hope is to get their assets acquired by a big defense contractor like MOT, BAE, etc, to supply the niche of north american public sector mobile devices.

Like a Canadian hockey team Blackberry insists they invented the game, but every time they get to the playoffs they choke because they're just so overwhelmed at being invited.

Any interesting engineering they might have done in the past is dwarfed by their farcical inability to turn it into something people actually wanted.

It's just all so....canadian.

Komolgorov, Hofstadter, Autechre, and LISP.

This talk made my life. Thank you.

If you want to see staff withdraw, check out, or blow up at random, remove the consistency they use to self-assess their performance. A lot of tech companies are too young to understand that a meritocracy is more about leadership than trivia.

Flat organizations (as distinct from BDFLs) reward bullies and manipulators, consistently with the "star system" in the article, while punishing pro-social people who align based on principles and reasoned consent to rules.

Surveillance only works when people believe their communications are private and secure.

The 3rd party was probably NSA and they did not intervene up until because it would reveal the existence of a cracking technique.

What changed is that weighed against a possible court verdict that would tell every terrorist that no U.S. made device or encryption could possibly be secure, (causing targets to avoid using broken crypto) revealing the existence of a possible forensic technique was low risk.

The belief that it is possible to communicate securely is the most important thing for spies to maintain. The FBI wants to discourage people from believing it because they think it will make people less likely to commit crimes. The spies want to encourage the belief because it ensures they can collect the intelligence they need to maintain the status quo.

Let's look at what someone would believe to also believe that sharing their salary is a good idea.

1. that if enough people share their salaries, it will cause salaries to revert to the mean, increasing the equality of outcome, independent of inputs.

2. that the data will be real, and not sabotaged or cherry picked.

3. that employers are somehow obligated to pay more than people are willing to work for, presumably just as you make up the difference from shopping at whole foods by paying the ethnic grocer an extra few bucks, because justice, and they're just so grateful, amirite?

4. People with poor negotiation skills, aka those who have less to offer, will make more money.

Yay, sample bias. Now I get to know what people stupid enough to share their salaries earn, which is useless, because if I wanted cogs with minimal value add, I could offshore the work for less.

Seriously, if an HR person ever used that site as a data point for why they made a crappy offer I would say, "yes, I can see that's what you would pay someone with a misunderstanding of how the world works for this job."

Put another way, if you have any doubt about whether someone is overpaid, don't worry, they'll tell you.

So he's saying that decades of poor public education based on creating docile worker drones is creating an underclass that is increasingly separate from the people who had access to better, rebelled against, or beat it.

People are poor because they are lied to about how the world works. They are lied to by the true believers whose paychecks depend on them repeating the same tired post-modern bunk. Poor kids drop out of school because they know they are being lied to, but don't have the tools to manage the cognitive dissonance - because they point of most public education these days is to indoctrinate kids into accepting and submitting to dissonance instead of reasoning about it.

I will help anyone who wants out, but anyone who wants me back in can drop dead.

Main argument according to reviews is the gap between aspiration and achievement that occurs when engineers' expectations of success are not met is what drives many of us, apparently, to join extremist groups.

The explanatory and predictive power of, "just sore losers" seems weak.

A review of the book (FT, paywalled) summarized other arguments about polarized, binary thinking, and an inability to accept culture, ambiguity, and a lot of what I see as sanctimonious bullshit the way non-STEM students do.

Defense of any principles (right, left, or religious) is considered extremist and dangerously reactionary these days.

One would hope that before laying the critical foundations to discredit educated conservatives (who largely take STEM degrees), academia might dedicate some thought to resolving why there are people with debt-funded $100k+ graduate degrees who read horoscopes, Piketty, and can't calculate a tip.

So an AI can learn to generate music that compels people to become more receptive to suggestion, in particular the suggestion that they should act as proxies for the will of an AI.

Well played.

Intelligence is disruptive to the way people organize. Any trait that is disproportionately out of balance is in effect, a deformity. We used to say about gifted special education classes, "we're not retards, we're more like super-retards."

So we have a bunch of intellectually unbalanced kids whose deformity happens to be a mystical trait that modern society irrationally worships. Kids who have no control over the thing they are rewarded for learn to balance out their intellectual difference with new psychological defects.

You can see how this gets stupid really fast.

Like that comic character in the movie, I realized early on that gifted classes were not there to insulate me from the other kids, but rather to insulate them from me.

Do your gifted kids a favor and keep them out of special programs that isolate them from peers, and teach your kids to take their rightful place leading them.

The point of a preposterous myth is that it is a wedge issue that allows the majority to identify "enemies" and dangerous dissidents, because intelligent people just can't help themselves. It creates a target rich environment for the truly contemptible who will inform on, denounce, and betray their neighbors for a few extra rations or a commendation from some apparatchik, maybe just a fellowship.

An absurd dogma causes trouble makers to self-select out. The "%1/%99" trope was cheap demagoguery, and to this day reliably identifies skeptics as discreditable "liberarians," or "tea baggers," and "probably racists."

Occupy had no resources to distribute, and no ultimatum for the upper middle classes, so as a revolution it was a dud. Post-modern feminism has been a successful revolution (unless it's counter-revolutionary to say the revolution has ended already, comrade)because its resource was essentially sex, whereby male academics and administrators were convinced that being a "sensitive new age guy" would get them laid, and that critical theory was something more than gibberish.

This ushered in a generation of cultural studies programs that exist primarily to legitimize the victimization claims of groups who incorporate an anti-capitalist mandate into their demands for public money. Governments are cool with it because 1. they are non-violent demands for more revenue, and 2. government defers to those academics as "expert" policy advisers. It's a bit of a circle squirt.

BLM has the chance to be a successful revolutionary movement, much moreso than the Oregon ranch guys or some of the militias, but they haven't got the formula down yet. I don't want to help because all these movements have totalitarian aims, as from their perspective it's ok if it's a dictatorship of "good" people.

Have fun storming the castle!

Inflammatory, by that do you mean, problematic, citizen?

It's not my social math, it's from the book I mentioned in the original post. There is a political calculus to power, and there are some good game theory models of it. It would be hard to deny that academia has seen a sea change in political thinking in the last 20 years (unless we've always been at war with eurasia), just as against all reason and sense, Trump has managed to become a contender. Stuff changes. There are models to describe some of it. Sorry if I tipped a sacred cow. I thought this was hacker news not reddit.

To a point. Startups aren't about wielding totalitarian power. The crappy ones are more about the short con of trading lottery tickets (options) for labor, and using the myth of magical genius to sell stakes to bookies and rubes.

There are great businesses out there that respond to real market needs, but a lot of tech companies only seem to exist in the window of lag between collapsing marginal cost and eventual market saturation.

Actually, I make an effort to be sufficiently even handed that only a committed partisan could take offense.

The essence of any totalitarian strategy is to seize some resources, invent a necessarily preposterous myth, then in exchange for demonstrating belief in the myth, re-distribute the resources arbitrarily among a minority of people who are easily replaceable and know it. The secret is to then reward people from the majority for denouncing and replacing members of the minority for not being zealous enough, so that they can elevate themselves through commitment to the myth. This has the self-policing effect of keeping everyone in line.

So long as you can keep those resources coming to your ruling coalition of highly replaceable idiots, you are golden. Read Smith and DeMesquita's "Dictator's Handbook" for details of how this works.

It doesn't matter whether that myth is of a 3000 year reign, the supreme right of a proletariat, the divinity of leader, that my golf handicap includes 11 holes in one, the revolution, or even that my particular tribe or ethnic group is morally superior to your tribe or ethnic group. It's all the same shit.

What people don't talk about is how these assholes seize power. It's through charismatic promises of future rewards to people who think they have nothing. They appeal to the greed and impulsiveness of the poor, it's a straight short con.

The nuanced part is how you get current status quo supporters to switch sides and provide their support to the challenger. They do this with a second message that triggers the middling man's sense of loss aversion. This is just posing a credible prisoners dilemma in which if moderates and supporters defect now, they get to keep their social position, but if they hold out, they will lose everything.

Arguably, this model of political polarization shows how ISIS works, how feminism annexed academia, why Trump is popular, why Occupy failed but why BLM could grow exponentially.

Nazi's were repugnant, but history would show that being repugnant is likely more indicative of political success than failure.

Banksy reference. he tagged, "If graffiti changed anything it would be illegal."

Mocks Populi

There is a an apocryphal story in which your anonymous correspondent was on a small business jet somewhere between Davos and Dubai, when he asked a former Thatcher minister what shade of pink the Financial Times newspaper was. "Parlour," the minister replied. It is in the spirit of this self-referential anecdote that an auspicious news peg has provided an opportunity to sound off on a pet saw and perhaps let on that I went to Cambridge.

Broadly, this newspaper is neither here nor there on a given issue, other than to say that it is different from what you expect - and for reasons that may surprise you. The prediction will be driven by the available data, include a smirk at the newcomer, and give a sop to the status quo. All things equal, it will predict outcomes that are some function of the sum of elements by the number of elements, and provide a view that is "radically centerist," if perhaps a bit smug. A reversion to the mean, indeed.

-- Every Economist Article Ever

It's not just about tech. The real issue is that government is running up against scaling limits.

Arguably, a government can only rule over how people relate within boundaries it can defend and control. Previously the boundaries were physical geographies, and then regulated channels (mail, PSTN, etc). Now, we have a kind of fractal boundary of peer-to-peer connections that provide tremendous freedom to organize and transact on a diminishingly microscopic scale.

Sovereignty is zero sum.

Crypto provides a kind of micro-sovereignty to users, and for a few privileged or outlying people this is an acceptable risk, but when you have constituencies of people achieving that micro-sovereignty, it cuts into the sovereignty of the state at critical level.

Imagine the strategic consequences for U.S. national security if Rhode Island became it's own country, with an impenetrable laser air shield, with it's own allies, currency, tax laws, extradition treaties, defense systems, resources, etc. It would be such a constant threat, it would make more sense to just invade.

Tor and similar systems could reach that critical mass, where they become a constant threat to the sovereignty of nations. Tech is naively forcing hard questions about the conventions that provide "stability."

The feds know they might just have to just outlaw crypto. The technology exists to detect and round up most people who use it, or enough of them that it will be hard to find people to use it with. If they have to, they will.

This dance they are doing is political posturing, testing the edges to see what kind of resistance they get, and how much political capital it is going to cost.

Like voting and graffiti, if crypto really changed anything, it would be illegal.

The blog has some good points for resisting the question, and got the first one right (e.g. courtesy to my current employer, don't give it out b/c salaries are considered competitive info.)

It is sad that people go into high-value salary negotiations once every 18-36 months without having read the basic books on negotiation before. Look them up on any MBA syllabus.

Here are some notes based on a book outline I have for a manual on negotiations for STEM grads (that I will probably never write):

First, remember that you are the seller, and it's up to you whether you want to sell to them. You aren't applying for an honor or academic award, or begging for mercy and approval, you are selling valuable skills. Sometimes you are a price maker, sometimes you are a price taker. Know which one you are before choosing your strategy.

Second, always appeal to principle. Real negotiation is a rational process of legitimate price discovery between parties. There is a true price, a kind of superposition, that is acceptable to all parties, and the work is to infer its position. You are engaging in a partnership to discover together if there is a viable deal. Understand the detailed differences between haggling, bullying/ultimatums, and negotiation. A negotiation is a conversation in which you derive principles to agree upon, and those principles shape the outcome (final numbers).

Third, always reiterate your commitment to flexibility and and appeal to their reciprocity of this principle. If they decline both reciprocity and flexibility, especially without a specific number, it's likely there isn't a real deal on the table.

Fourth, add variables (new principles) to soften positions. If they start haggling numbers at you, you can always ask what the principle behind a number is. (what's that number based on? Is it data I can see? What data did you disqualify? Here's one of the data sources I am using..).

Fifth, state you are evaluating "total package value." If they propose a number, you can ask about bonuses, equity, options, commissions, memberships, travel rewards, lifestyle perks, housing allowances, medical, vehicles, benefits, retirement matching, concierge services, wellness, "no red M&M's" etc. Anything they say no to, you can say you will evaluate any offer based on pricing in the value of these other things, whether they are in benefits or cash.

Sixth, know wtf you are talking about. If you don't know what the position pays in that city because you don't know how glassdoor works, and you don't know how much it would cost (gross) to pay a consultant to do the work instead of you, you are flying blind.

Seventh, never, ever, give anyone your current compensation. That's between you and your tax authority. Like many bits of information, it can only ever be used to disadvantage you. They will be extra persistent and act shocked and insulted because some of them are so used to STEM's just rolling over on the question. That's a tactic. Always appeal to principle, in this case, the principle of your employers competitive information. They might walk away, but only because they want a sucker and determined you weren't one.

Eighth, answer recruiters calls and emails and do interviews even if you aren't interested. You need the practice, and you may be surprised at how good a given opportunity turns out to be. Recruiters and HR people are in the business of selling jobs to talent. You are not wasting their time. If they can't close you on selling you a job, they are only wasting their own time.

Ninth, there are only about 4 reasons a principled negotiation fails: 1) one side is not committed to flexibility and reciprocity; 2) there just wasn't a viable deal between those parties on those terms in the first place; 3) one party was bluffing or exaggerating about their ability to deliver on their part of the bargain; 4) parties lack the emotional maturity to have principled discussions about abstract concepts and hypotheticals.

Tenth, if there were the possibility of an advance, I would be willing to have the conversation about what a deal would look like.

;)

Security apparatus position in a nutshell:

"If you give up your freedoms, we'll protect you next time."

Great, thanks. Pricks.

Because web development in brainfuck was already written?