rhema

I love my little dual core X99 board with Xeon E5 2673 V3. It's not power efficient, but I just leave it in my basement for local Jupyter Notebook stuff. Much faster than everything cloud-based for a reasonably price at my scale.

9 year old me got my first "hacking" experience out of this game. With the shareware version, you could not select the ultra tank that could shoot 3 bullets for a human, but you COULD if it were the computer player.

The "hack": -start a game with a normal tank VS ultra computer player as p2. -save the game (as a file). -open the game file. -read the ASCII text and just flip which player has which text.

Now, I had my ultra tank.

I tried the same questions with my own account. I was surprised at how much it was able to synthesize that wasn't completely off-base.

This makes it worse, no? I can't imagine this is not happening right now by lovers, close friends, and agencies.

Just look at past attempts such as xkeyscore. It was keyword based and included words like UNIX to target people. They don't mind being wrong!

I used their RL book for a course I taught. It's beautifully written and freely available (http://incompleteideas.net/book/the-book-2nd.html)! I kept getting distracted by the beautiful writing that I would miss the actual content.

Sorry, folks. This is what you get when the institutions fail to help the people they ostensibly were designed to help. There are more than 400 government agencies. No one even knows which one is responsible for what. There are artificial fiefdoms that exist because they self-perpetuate, are effective at shifting blame, and curry a perception of importance.

IMHO, Elon is an agent of chemotherapy for an obviously overgrown bureaucratic cancer. He will take it too far. It's a dirty and thankless job. However, it might be the only way to "refactor" the state without a civil war or revolution. It reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justinian_I , who rewrote laws (cut 90% of the volume) to consolidate their meaning.

I'm not cheering for it, but institutions have lost.

I don't think everyone should have bunch of kids. However, if you are in a good relationship and both like having kids, think about having 5 instead of 2. My personal experience of having 5+ kids is that the difficulty mostly scales logarithmically, meaning kid 1 is a lot of work, kid 2 is a lot more work, but kid 3 more (but less more) work.

The social dynamics can really work well. Kids can be less work when they can entertain each other. Add some homeschooling, work from home, and creative projects and it makes life really fulfilling.

YMMMV, but it's a valid and reasonable way to live for some.

I always thought the GW was short for George W. Bush. Not a popular figure when XP came out.

FYI, I posted this mainly for its description and illustration of the VHS format. The author of the video has very high quality explanations of technical and cultural details of instruments.

There's a truck exactly like that a block away from where I live in my rural town.

Seems pretty low for one of the most powerful people in the world.

True? How could it be anything but true. Twitter is a complex system that started when text messages were by and large SMS via a 10 number key pad on brick phones.

While Elon has rough edges, imagine his situation. It's a hostile take over where it's not just the board, but the workers themselves who have bad blood with Elon specifically. How do you manage a company when 90% of its employees are expecting and almost encouraging it to burn to the ground?

It's tricky. Imagine your coworkers were tying to sabotage you and you needed to be able to give them tasks on a large complex project. Even when goals are aligned, small differences in implementation directions can fracture teams. So, I understand where he's coming from.

She may be getting off relatively easy. If she happened to be in an embassy, it might have cost her an arm and a leg, and another arm and another leg...

They do have the Oculus store. It's not a competitor yet, but may be in 10 years.

Once in a while, I see a cluster of books in a Goodwill or Salvation Army that are very niche. Like, 20 books on flyfishing among 200 books. I bet the most interesting people to meet have odd collections of books.

This is not dragnet mass surveillance of the kind more often associated with the National Security Agency. These are hacks, or “exploits,” designed for individual targets.

Mhmm. Pray tell what oversight should make me believe this is true?

Snowden and Manning were not seeking to blow the whistle on any one particular policy, in the manner that Ellsberg was; theirs was a more generalized disaffection, and the troves of data that they exposed were indiscriminate

Both good whistleblowers who I do not care what ideological principles inspired them.

Unlike other prominent digital leakers, Schulte did not seem like an ideological whistle-blower.

I guess you have to be a good person to be a whistleblower in the CIA. Maybe that's why they don't hire good people.

My mother-in-law has severe eye problems and MS type symptoms. 16 years ago, I showed her how ctrl shift +/- could make her fonts huge. This one tip that is not obvious to most folks improved and continue to improve her quality of life _drastically_.

Why did people lose faith in the institutions? Because the institutions deserve it.

Academic findings only have so much scope. It's nuanced and the news reporters, kindergarten teachers, and scientists themselves often overclaim the impact of the findings. All of the short term incentives reward overclaiming over nuance and no one should be surprised that the zeitgeist is where it is.

Your interpretation is entirely plausible. At the same time, I found the interview to be very convincing in terms of Fravor's credibility. He mentions details about who was with him, bar scenes, and generally comes across as a professional. Historical sightings (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_fighter ) and angelic phenomena ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1561_celestial_phenomenon_over... ) are much older and at least predate the current US military objectives.

It's also totally possible that this is some kind of funding grab. That Rubio et al. are simply pawns being teased and pushed around in the name of national security to fund large and barely monitored government research and military funding. It could be some of both.

Not that I know of, so I take your point there. Here's a related video with some radar data https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rh4QngYJG4I . In the interview, Frevor does talk about the radar and instrumentation on the plane, but it's been a while since I listened to it.

Well, the only reason they were scrambled to begin with is that they had been tracking these objects for weeks using advanced radar. As I understand it, the radar is based on multiple resolutions. The active radar can point in the direction of objects of interest and get very very precise measurements. It's not just the video, its the radar data.

The thing that pushed me over the edge in believing these things is the long podcast interview between Commander David Fravor and Lex Fridman.

Tufte isn't exactly wrong, but the way he writes has so much certainty in it. In reality, the design choices people make in the media they use has as much to do with social norms and culture as what really works.

Alternatives like Prezi exist, but are not really going to be accepted in formal presentations https://infovisu.com/assets/pubs/linder2015beyond.pdf .

If you really bring me a physical piece of paper today, I doubt I would be able to keep track of it.

Bill Hicks was right about advertising.

I was thinking about immunity generally, from a Shannon information theory perspective. It's impossible that the human body has an infinite ability to absorb immunity, because otherwise we could store an infinite amount of information. Therefore, there must be some kind of forgetting that happens. Likewise, the body can only learn so much from repeated exposure.

Is anyone aware of any writing that explains immunity from an information theory perspective?

I'm still convinced that "Havana Syndrome" is just CIA officers feeling bad about what they do or who they work for. This used to be called "regret" or "having a conscience". The recordings that "diplomats" made of buzzing noises turned out not to be secret spy tech, but crickets in heat.

Yes, fixed. Thank you.

It would be easier to "trust the science" for the plebs out there if they felt that institutions valued their needs. Insulin could cost $15 per vial, but they can cost $300. The financial institutions (see 2008 crash) caused no problems for leaders of institutions.

When I hear someone say "trust the science", I hear, "institutions have worked out for me so far". As much as we wish it were based on rational belief, it is almost certainly personal experience.

George Carlin was right: "they" want you to be smart enough to keep the system moving, but too dumb to see how inequitable the system is.

EDIT: Addressing the "that's just capitalism, not science" point.

You can't really separate the funding from institutions from the products / science. Governments limit the possible research that can be done, media brings in attention and recognition, universities placate their owners (corporate, government, academic, investors). None of the institutions are really motivated by what the base needs or wants apart from avoiding actual anarchy and chaos. It's not a conspiracy. It is power getting more power and power corrupting, quite naturally and with people making rational choices in their own self interest.

I have a hard time believing this was / is the real version used. It doesn't seem broad enough. More likely it was a kind of smoketest that made sure that a more automated keyword checker was working.

It does remind me of the XKEYSCORE (Snowden leaks) that used keywords to bubble up potential threats from emails etc https://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-prism-keywords-for-domes... .

The summary I quote below represents the paranoid or less-successful-than-they-want-to-be professor. There are many at all levels of success and career development have literally devoted their lives to ideas they think will change the world if implemented. I've heard of people "scooping" ideas, decade long blockades on ideas, etc. People fail to cite the right people. Is that because they don't want to share glory or because it's not easy to keep up with research? The phrase "success has many fathers failure is an orphan" comes to mind.

----- he thinks his ideas are very important;

he thinks he doesn’t get as much credit as he deserves (especially for those important ideas);

he interprets in unflattering, even dark, terms the motivations of people who seem to keep him (or his relatives) from getting credit;

he strains to see pattern where it may not exist.

I hope there is security footage. If not, I don't like the trend for governments / organizations / powerful people in exacting justice.

You might try to get longish distance walkie-talkies. They are cheap and probably go far enough. I let my (similar age) kids free range a block or two, especially if they go together and bring a walkie talkie.