kongin

You don't have to threaten to leave, you do leave.

And yet we heard the same thing last December.

Things aren't going back to normal, when Australia opens up regardless of vaccination status thousands of people will die if they are lucky and tens of thousands if they are not.

The vaccines have been a huge disappointment with constant goal post moving the only way to keep people from noticing.

Way back when I reached out to them for getting the actual blueprints for a light industry coop - modular open source welders? Sign me up!

Got a reply along the lines of "we are working with our sponsors and will not be releasing any blueprints".

10 years later you still can't get blueprints from their site: https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/gvcs-machine-index/

They seem like the solar roadways of open source hardware.

The reason why AWS got popular everywhere I worked was that you didn't need to get buying new hardware past ops. You just spun up your own, then when it was supporting half the business you pointed at it and said "Gee wouldn't it be nice if we had a box in our own data center to run it?" then there'd be a fire lit under the ass of ops and you'd get your computers in a week instead of next financial year.

Now it's exactly the same thing in AWS. My next guess is that you're going to be running production code on fleets of devs computers because you don't have to get extra budget for AWS next financial year to afford spinning up another instance.

Just look where the best and brightest CS graduates from top schools go to.

Yeah, it's not google or facebook. The people who go there today went to Wall Street/law firms 20 years ago. The shift started 10 years ago which is when it stopped being fun to work at google/facebook. Sure the people going there have the grades and cv but they don't have the brains.

It's kind of stunning that starting with fully open technologies we build another closed mainframe on top of it.

All that's old is new again.

I feel exceedingly stupid for never having thought about something so simple.

You both overestimate and underestimate the intelligence of intelligence agencies.

Yeah and it's been getting gentrified since.

It sucks that a bunch of nimbys came here and threw everyone fun out.

Hell even pg would get flagged off hn if he said the stuff he used to in the 00s.

If you haven't read the article read it, don't just read the title.

I have no idea if this is the type of thing they put as reading material in toilets in the pentagon (which I fully support if they also regularly run out of toilet paper) or if this is what top level intelligence analysis is.

If it's the former the West is doomed:

The term "psycho-terrorism" was coined by Russian writer N. Anisimov of the Moscow Anti-Psychotronic Center. According to Anisimov, psychotronic weapons are those that act to "take away a part of the information which is stored in a man's brain. It is sent to a computer, which reworks it to the level needed for those who need to control the man, and the modified information is then reinserted into the brain." These weapons are used against the mind to induce hallucinations, sickness, mutations in human cells, "zombification," or even death. Included in the arsenal are VHF generators, X-rays, ultrasound, and radio waves. Russian army Major I. Chernishev, writing in the military journal Orienteer in February 1997, asserted that "psy" weapons are under development all over the globe.

At the time the Russian Armies largest concern was getting enough socks for it's conscripts in Chechnya.

I would expect to read material of this quality on the 4chan conspiracy board or maybe infowars if it's a slow newsday, not in official US government documentation.

Tangentially related is the concept of a memetic hazard, although this would be more something that targets the collective hivemind rather than weapons that target individual human brains.

>The only body-related information warfare element considered by the United States is psychological operations (PSYOP)[5]

>What technologies have been examined by the United States that possess the potential to disrupt the data-processing capabilities of the human organism? The 7 July 1997 issue of U.S. News and World Report described several of them designed, among other things, to vibrate the insides of humans, stun or nauseate them, put them to sleep, heat them up, or knock them down with a shock wave.[9] The technologies include dazzling lasers that can force the pupils to close; acoustic or sonic frequencies that cause the hair cells in the inner ear to vibrate and cause motion sickness, vertigo, and nausea, or frequencies that resonate the internal organs causing pain and spasms; and shock waves with the potential to knock down humans or airplanes and which can be mixed with pepper spray or chemicals.[10]

It literally isn't. This is the equivalent of attacking a network switch by running main power into the Ethernet ports. I have no idea why they are using the word firewall here, a much better title would be 'Human senses have no fuses'.

>According to Solntsev, one computer virus capable of affecting a person's psyche is Russian Virus 666. It manifests itself in every 25th frame of a visual display, where it produces a combination of colors that allegedly put computer operators into a trance. The subconscious perception of the new pattern eventually results in arrhythmia of the heart. Other Russian computer specialists, not just Solntsev, talk openly about this "25th frame effect" and its ability to subtly manage a computer user's perceptions. The purpose of this technique is to inject a thought into the viewer's subconscious. It may remind some of the subliminal advertising controversy in the United States in the late 1950s.

The whole thing reads like the National Enquirer but for spooks. I seriously hope that this is not the level of discourse in the military and 3 letter agencies (but expect it is with dread) because we'd be better served by a troop of chimps flinging shit at a chart when it comes to deciding what new technologies to finance.

At least it makes the last 5 years of insanity around Russia, Trump, Facebook and everything else we are having a moral panic over seem sane by comparison.

In 2006 SF was well on the way to world domination, google was the hottest place to work and a whole bunch of other things were cropping up. The long cold internet winter after 2000 was thawing and dotcom bubble 2.0 was just starting to throf.

I rather enjoyed the internet 2000-2005. It was like squatting and having a rave in an recently abandoned factory.

What's a good IRC channel for cs/maths/physics?

After the freedone implosion I don't know where anything is any more.

It reads like oldschool creepy-pasta from 4chan. The point isn't that it's true (it's not) the point is that it takes something that you've felt (online comments that can't possibly be made by a sane human being) and builds a whole cosmology around it to explain why it happens in the most convoluted and disturbing way possible.

This is the type of high quality tinfoil hattery I've missed.

Wake up sheeple the lizzards are here!

Signing packets is not a new idea.

The problem still is that you have no way to authenticate on any layer above the hardware.

Ham radio as is is stuck in the 1960s which given the age of the people on it isn't really surprising.

Different bands have different physical properties.

One of the points of amateur radio is experimentation. Right now the old boys clubs that all ham radio organizations have turned into to have decided that packet networking isn't real ham radio and you shouldn't be able to do it on "their" spectrum.

Apart from talking to satellites, packets and encryption are fine there for some reason.

In universities Google and FB are now seen the same way as law firms and hedge funds were seen 20 years ago. A boring place where you go to have an upper middle class career and be conventional. Which means they are ripe for disruption.

Regarding mesh networking, you don't have to have encryption to do that. It could still be very interesting, you just have to know that people can inspect your transmissions. If they didn't allow this restriction, I imagine the system would just be overrun.

You can't have traffic that is ssl, ssh, or any other encrypted protocol. Stop and think how useful a network you can have without that, no emails, no websites, no authenticated connections between computers.

The only things we have left are http, telnet and anonymous ftp.

Welcome to the 80s Arpanet, but anyone can modify your packets undetectably.

But then it's no longer Amateur Radio,

Take your binary message, encrypt it, use a lookup table to encode the bits into common English words, send them in the clear.

No sir, this is just a random word service which provides random words free on the air.

I'd say that HAM can evolve or it can die -- but eventually the people holding it back will literally die and then it will evolve all the same. That's how actual evolution works. You can't stop the future. Still, you can hold it back, and it's unfortunate to see that happening, from a community of techies no less.

Pretty much sums it up. Locally the people who are in charge of the clubs which ultimately advised the government were in their 50s to 90s (yes that's a 9). The people doing anything more interesting than talking on on those channels are all under 40.

Ham radio is meant for experimentation, not (just) talking to your friends. These people remind me of Bell in the 70s forbidding you from connecting anything that's not a phone to the telephone network.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_economy

Using a decimal expansion adds 25% overhead from pure maths. Your cache will be larger if you're working in base ten regardless of what optimizations your compiler does.

It's still not as efficient since you're breaking on base 10 digit boundaries, not base 2, the most efficient encoding will be base 3, but alas we don't have ternary computers.

I pay universities to get a degree.

Companies pay me to work.

They are welcome to pay my consulting rates of $300 per hour for interview questions.

… but that’s exactly how conversion to string works, so handrolling an algorithm would likely be around the same speed.

https://github.com/lattera/glibc/blob/master/stdio-common/_i...

It's all bit-shifts, bit-masks and a lot of other hacks to get the maximum performance out of the system you're compiling the code on.

Could I write something with better performance on my system? Yeah, after a week to run tests and write esoteric macros.

I'd read a short story about it.

Facebook has gotten worse with its young liberal staff. And I don't mean in the dark patterns for more clicks sense, I mean in the cpu cycles to do a basic operation.

Maybe it's time for the old crusty developers making $60k on embedded systems to take a shot at it.

I suggest they act like a non-for-profit and live within their means from the mountain of cash they already have.

I rather enjoyed the short essay: https://web.archive.org/web/19970614230544/jubal.westnet.com...

In my Lovecraftian phase I imagined an infinite winding black pagoda with brail inscriptions on its walls. If you're very lucky you would wander up or down until you died of thirst reading nothing but nonsense. If you weren't you'd find the necronomicon or worse. Unlike the library the text would not be finite and there would be no limit to the eldritch horrors you could find within.

Google chrome helpfully asked me if I want to translate Polish to English.