nikster

Do your Human Design profile and see how much it fits.

Our society expects everyone to be a Generator (in HD terms) - all people who are not then feel like they're totally weird. In reality, they're just wired differently, and have other strengths and weaknesses.

Humanity is like a big puzzle piece.

As someone who never was into astrology, Human Design was a shock.

I didn't want to even consider that idea at all, but as I got my design read by someone I never met, and it matched 95% of what I already knew about myself, I had to admit that it just fits. And so it is for most people - it fits.

Whereas astrology always was a lame 50/50 "could be true or not true" kind of thing. HD is different.

For example I have open head centers - in HD this means I take in thoughts from others and get carried away with them; I also have an easy time to still my mind and have no inner dialogue. And in my life I had already observed if I am talking to someone who is genuinely really excited about something, I get excited about it too - to the point where I am joining their project or decide to buy a book etc - but when they leave and it wears off I am thinking... "wait... why was that so exciting again?"... Now I know how to watch it, and how to distinguish their emotions and thoughts from mine, very useful skill.

Same here. I had a conversation with friends who said, language influences thinking.

I said, no, I have thoughts, and I communicate them with language but the thoughts are not language.

Later we spoke about being able to have no thoughts - still mind. I said I can do this any time, I can stop the thoughts and be still. At the time I had no training but I could do it for 10, 20, 30 seconds easily. And I knew with training I'd be able to extend that time, it was effortless.

To them, that was crazy - they couldn't stop thinking at all!

So yes, we learn how our minds can work completely differently from one another.

The study of Human Design takes this to the next level - this strange science states that humans can be classified in 5 different general types which operate totally different from one another - it has taught me a lot about other people.

My base assumption that everyone is more or less like me - turned out to be completely off.

It's about control - Huawei was taking over too much tech for the deep state's taste.

Deep state is bugging American devices so they have a very good reason to believe the other side is doing the same - evidence or not.

Unfortunately in this case, I think the deep state is really that dumb. They did not foresee the consequences. They expected Huawei to fade away with a whimper - and if you read the article, it was a pretty close call, so the expectation wasn't entirely unfounded.

Motive was curbing Chinese state actor influence and also industry, ie preventing Huawei from crushing Google or Apple. it's not very smart but it's kind of how they think about it.

On both sides, tech companies and state intelligence services are walking hand in glove. It's not about devices being bugged per se, it's about siphoning more and more data into their own data centers, controlling more and more of the info highways, and so on. Potential backdoors only play a very minor role IMO - anything can be backdoored these days, and state actors anywhere have the resources to get into anything.

It's more about the front doors, ie our chinese security camera talking to chinese servers... large scale data collection that's not hidden.

Yes. I love AirBnB and the service it offers.

I just like to make fun of the app now and then, because it is overhyped and relatively poor at doing its job. But yeah it could be worse, I would give that app 7 stars out of 10, even though it's driving me crazy at times, and I've cursed it for making me wait 24 hours for the host to accept a booking when I booked for the next day.... thanks to instant book being obscured and not shown on the UI.

For family trips it is unbeatable. Big drama and big $$$ to book 2 connecting rooms in a normal hotel, and the experience is much worse than just getting a nice apartment with kitchen, 2 or 3 rooms, washing machine, etc.

IDK how people traveled with families before.

In the UX community it is indeed very funny to see AirBNB talk so much about their amazing UX, yet the app is very hard to use compared to something ugly and simple like booking.com. It looks good but it is a nightmare to use.

They change things around a lot, and sometimes they fix one issue, but then add another issue for no reason. I've ended up booking the wrong thing so many times - and even once would be too much for a good user interface design.

My latest pet peeve is that while you can filter by "instant book only" there is no indication anywhere on the UI whether or not a location is instant book. I always book last minute, and places that don't instantly book are basically useless to me - too much drama as to whether or not the host accepts my booking. 24 hour period where I have no idea if I have a place to stay - but I already paid and my money is locked up.

It seems it would be important to know. And they used to have an instant book icon on listings that offered it.

The wording on the booking button is also ambiguous. It says "reserve now" - sometimes this means you can make a booking, other times it means AirBnB will take the cash off your card but you will have to wait 24 hours before you know whether or not you actually reserved anything.

And there's other things also... the UI is dirt poor and we only use it because for long stays when I want a washing machine and so on, sometimes these AirBnBs are literally 10x better than a comparable hotel - it works, in other words, thanks to amazing hosts - no thanks to the poor software.

Booking.com has been working amazing for me. For single room, 1-2 people, it's been flawless over probably 100 bookings or more over the last few years.

Short term I always use booking since it's less hassle than AirBnB.

The opposite - I was watching MKBHDs review of the solar roof - he was charging his Tesla model S ... using only the roof for 11 months out of 12!

That means - total energy independence. I can get a solar roof and no longer need "the government" ie, a bunch of criminals, to "help" me.

Strangely this is never on the news. Ever. Go figure.

Yeah - there are many use cases still where EVs are way worse or even totally inadequate. Yours is one. Cold countries is another (sorry Canadians... don't buy Teslas just yet...). EV performance is horrific in cold conditions.

But the majority of use cases at this point is - EVs are way better. City driving, less than 100 miles per day, which is what most people do in most countries, charge at home, etc.

It's a new level.

Kia, Hyundai (same company I think) are well situated. As are BMW, Mercedes, and obviously Tesla.

But... Toyota? Nowhere to be seen, has some also-ran EVs in production. The old American carmakers - absent. VW - been talking about EVs for years but ... nothing.

The biggest carmakers in the world have a vested interest in keeping EVs off the market for as long as possible.

The better tech always wins in the end. It's a no-brainer.

The problem with resistance of the existing auto industry is that if everyone buys EVs the big American carmakers go out of business. GM, Ford, etc have nothing, no technology to compete, their EVs are still crap, they are unable to catch up. So are many Japanese carmakers also BTW.

I was recently in Hong Kong - a good 50% of cars there are EVs thanks to tax breaks - no taxes on EVs while other cars are heavily taxed, so that makes even high end EVs cheaper than mid range gas cars. I think I tried every single model EV using Uber, Mercedes, BMW, and Tesla primarily, they're all really great EVs, great cars, great range, great comfort, obviously insane acceleration. Just better cars.

There's also a range of Chinese EVs coming up - didn't test I guess they are too rare to show up on Uber.

American carmakers then spread all sorts of FUD about EVs such that my facebook feed is full of people who really believe EVs are worse for the environment than their exploding mineral oil machines. They hold back all development through propaganda, lawmaking, political influence, anything and everything they can do - because they can easily act like a mafia. They can't easily compete with the good EVs of the world. Or at all.

Situation report complete.

This is a massive discovery!

It's hard to even imagine the multitude of applications of this.

Fall guy took the hit.

That had always been plan B.

The only reason for the GDPR is to get more government control on your daily interactions.

People are out of their mind to think that governments are working to "protect" them - hello? Govern ment means to rule the mind, mind control, that's the word, and the main mind control governments are interested in perpetuating is to make you believe you need them.

If people didn't think they need their government, there would be no more governments - and they couldn't control us.

Logically, if I was the government, I would mainly work on making sure that people think they need me. I would have every incentive to create catastrophes, pandemics, wars, in fact I would have every incentive to create any problem that has, as its solution, more governmental control.

Alexa... well you paid for this device to spy on you so that definitely should not surprise anyone.

I think it's bizarre that people are not only OK with having their house bugged with a device that listens to their every conversation - but they're happy to pay for the privilege.

Do you know that when you have an argument with your partner, Alexa is listening to the whole thing? Sensitive business meetings... etc... very strange!

My hypothesis is a lot simpler:

Hacking is much more profitable than preventing hacking.

Incentives are heavily biased towards security exploits on all levels.

End of story.

There's no reward for "your code never got hacked". There's a reward for delivering a feature in time and a penalty for not doing so.

You'll get a bonus or promotion for delivering features. If you take twice as long because you made your code really secure - no one will know.

I think that's really all there is to it. Security is obscure and complicated.

Reading the OA, I also believe that there's a wide variety of technical detail that could be the cause of, say, not responding.

Maybe the reports get to the tech teams, the tech team figures out that this bug will definitely be caught by the static analyzer, and they have other more pressing issues.

The main problem today IMO is that the incentives for finding and actively using exploits are much higher than the incentives for fixing them, and certainly much higher than building secure code that doesn't have the issues in the first place.

After all, nobody will give you a medal for delivering secure code. They will give you a medal for delivering a feature fast.

Accurate - Engineering at Apple has no tradition of security; nor does it have a tradition of being very efficient. It's mostly based on heroics of some very few very talented developers. Processes that are in place are actively hindering development.

Scaling development is hard, and Apple has never really gotten it right. I am wondering if a zero day is $1M on the open market - wouldn't it be easier and cheaper to get an engineer inside Apple to leave some plausible deniability bugs in the code? Or compromise an engineer already there?

Software engineering never had security as its main goal - but today, if you had to do it all over, security would be built into all processes from the get go, and that's likely the only way software could be made secure.

It always amazes me Apple (and others) can't even make a browser that doesn't have a drive by zero day that can take over my computer. Why is that? There must be something fundamentally wrong in the system here. And I think what's wrong is that security was not even in the minds of engineers when most of these software modules were created.

BSD had it built in, but they watered it down instead of - what they should have done - doubling down on it.

100% - they got away with it because they were small. Hacking Mac OS was unattractive - whereas, hacking iOS is the most attractive target. High gain, low security.

Apple does not have security in its DNA, as is obvious from all these exploits. Apple lives in the past where it was OK to kinda fudge it, to kinda give home apps special passes, to bypass stuff to make the game center work, and so on and so forth. These are all red flags.

Apple's threat model is script kiddies and Russian hacker groups. It's very naive vs real world exploits conducted by state level actors, companies serving state level actors, and a $1M market rate for iPhone zero day p0wn exploits.

In this cat and mouse game, the hackers are leagues ahead at this point - motivated by money and a whole different mindset.

Relying on the app store review process to catch these things is naive. A company that takes security seriously would never even think this way, obviously there's many ways around app store reviews, and hackers who went through all the trouble of finding exploits will find a way around the app store reviews, too.

You're underestimating the problem here. For those of us who have awakened to the fact that mainstream media is a giant shitshow that is literally used to brainwash the masses into agendas of unelected powers, this is a major, major issue.

The reason this planet is waking up now is that the media can't be controlled as they used to. People share on facebook, other social media, Medium, youtube - there's no stopping ALL information from coming out!

In the past, if you had control of the media, you would control what people were thinking. It's that simple! All media is owned by 6 entities which have very close ties to each other, so it's really just one entity for all purposes.

You are falling for an illusion when you think that media is in any way independent or impartial.

Media mind control tells you what to think about. You get 2 or 3 prefab opinions that you can have about it, but they control what you're thinking about. You don't get to think about anything else. You don't get to think about things they don't want you to think about. Because they get you up in arms about whatever, they create a grand circus of different opinions, one against another - while you shout at your neighbor, or loudly complain how stupid NRA supporters are, they are doing whatever the hell they want behind the scenes, and nobody even thinks about questioning it.

They start entire wars where millions die, while they have you talk about a staged shooting! It's absurd!

So Medium going the way of censorship means they have joined the masses, the mainstream, and they are going to be controlled, just like anyone else. There's simply a myriad ways to control the feed once censorship has been established. It's sold to you with images of child molesters and nazis, but it's actually for one purpose only: To control your thinking.

Have a good day :)

R.I.P. Medium. It was good to know you. If there isn't a blockchain based censorship-proof publishing platform soon, I will work on one. Promise.

You could also say they have enabled the rise of Baidu and with it a Google clone that is completely under the control of the Chinese government.

I do respect Google for pulling out - this was actually the last time Google actually really tried to "don't be evil". Since then, they've thrown that overboard. But that one time, they did it.

The problem is that the outcome was worse than remaining there. That was a lack of wisdom on Google's part.

Apple could pull out, lose Billions of dollars and a hundred million users, Chinese wouldn't be able to get their hands on iPhones, and Samsung, Meizu, Huawei, and so on would be having a field day selling their government-approved devices, which, in terms of privacy, are infinitely worse than iPhones.

Apple is actually implementing some pretty serious privacy features, like end to end encryption in iMessage and so on.

They're working on it...

Yes. Engagement always beats sanctions. As in, it's impossible to sanction China - China has no issues kicking out Google, Apple, and anyone else who doesn't want to follow the laws.

Apple is wise enough to not suddenly engage in a battle for human rights. It's not the place of a company to change the laws.

What they can do is remain there, implement strong encryption everywhere, protect their users. That's what they're doing.

First of all here's the good news: You have been deceived! By the media!

The media is making money by reporting on "things that could kill you". It's getting more efficient at that over time, so if you do watch the news - and I implore you not to - you will start to believe the world is a bad place. That is because you will never, ever hear anything positive in the news. Because it won't sell.

For every crime in this world, there are ten million selfless acts of love. If the news reported on both equally, it'd be very boring. You'd constantly hear about somebody helping another, or putting somebody else before themselves, and you would never even get to the crimes. Not enough time.

For every murder in this world, there's a friend risking his own life for another. Or 10. We won't know. For every war, there's a million times more peace.

Look at the facts, people. Is it so hard to understand? Is propaganda, dull, dumb, and effective as it is really so hard to get around? Open your eyes, and turn off your TV, newspapers, and the associated websites.

There are three reasons why watching news is a huge waste of your time. 1 - negative bias to an extreme that is hard to imagine, as described 2 - non-actionable items. Each time you consume news in any form, ask yourself: What can I do about it? What do I have to do about it? Why did I need to know this? Am I just rubbernecking here (hint: YES, you are!)? 3 - Propaganda and lies. I used to read my local paper front to back every day. And there were a handful of reported-on news where I was an eye-witness. A demonstration, an accident involving me. And even for these harmless items, the news was just plain wrong. THIS WAS NOT WHAT HAD HAPPENED. But it was in the paper. Facts had been altered. Not even maliciously, just to make better story, or because the journalist on the ground couldn't see everything, or whatever. Now if the stories I had direct first hand knowledge of where wrong - how about all the others I knew nothing about? How accurate is that going to be? It's not.

And war propaganda. Just read up on Goebbels, every nation in the world is today doing the same things, and the patterns are so easy to spot you will wonder how you could ever miss them. All the media, particularly in the US, but also other countries, are full of it.

"My main distinction is that personal happiness is not a goal of mine, but rather a side benefit from accomplishing something that has lasting tangible value for more than just myself and the people I am immediately exposed to."

Speaking of unfounded presuppositions... how do you know that this would make you happy? If you'd already done it, you'd already be happy. If you haven't, you can't know. Unfounded presupposition, then.

I don't want to make a semantic argument here though; the reason I think it won't make you happy is that nothing outside yourself, nothing external, can make you happy. You are, at the core of your being, already happy, already whole, already loved. Nothing can change that. You can uncover it by asking questions and by discovering and then questioning all the unfounded assumptions that govern your beliefs and opinions.

You have a basic misunderstanding of perception. It's common, everyone has this, the idea that you're this bag of meat separate from everyone. What are you supposed to do?

But, you will be good to yourself, and to others, if you discover who or what you really are, on a level where it cannot be described by words. It makes sense, therefore, to put your effort into that discovery.

The products you create - cool, but irrelevant as well. Bucheit is right about that. It's a game.

I think it's not a bad idea. If something on this catastrophic level happens, you're going to be unprepared. If you have a societal framework of how to go about your grief, I can imagine it will help some. It won't make anything better but it might provide something to hold on to when the hour is darkest.

My birthday just came up around then; I prefer to celebrate every day, not just once every 365. But that's just me.

Agreed. They are "odd" only because they contradict mainstream scientific belief. The strange thing is that a lot of people take mainstream scientific belief and make it into a truth so absolute they don't even realize it's a belief anymore. And that is deeply ironic given that may scientific theory is only going to be around until a better one replaces it - it's supposed to be that way.

Even the creationist theory - we have to admit that the story of a bearded man putting dinosaur bones in the ground is pretty silly. But who knows if 65% realy believe that - maybe the majority of those believes in an alternate creationist theory which basically boils down to the universe having an inherent intelligence and an inherent purpose. Which is something that I personally do believe and which people who believe in the "random co-incidence" universe will at least discuss.

Either way the only thing that can be said with absolute certainty of any belief is that it will turn out to be false.