samhw

Yeah, I am very troubled by it. I had a friend staying with me last year who I hadn't realised was schizophrenic (a hopelessly vague diagnosis but he undoubtedly had parted company with reality) and off his meds. It was horribly sad. He killed himself a few months later. My mum is a psychiatrist and insists that third-generation antipsychotics are not a 'chemical cosh', which I find doubtful, seeing as so many schizophrenics seem to consider them a worse prospect than unmedicated schizophrenia or death.

We're now giving these drugs to autistics, I gather, and low-dose olanzapine is even being trialled for kids with Asperger's. Compared with lobotomy I suppose it requires less cleaning up.

Since you mention India, I should add that India and other poor countries manage to treat schizophrenia with better remission rates than the UK and US: https://www.nature.com/articles/508S14a

Quite. Psychiatry loves to talk about brain scans and neuroanatomy, but until it dares to actually use them for diagnosis, I think it should be regarded as window dressing.

And you should always read these studies with a careful eye to whether the ADHD subjects are medicated. Often the studies literally measure the effect of the medication and nothing else. (It's a cruel irony for schizophrenics, who are put on antipsychotics that shrivel the cerebral cortex, only to find their shrivelled cerebral cortex brandished as evidence of their supposed dysfunction.)

Also, note that fMRI does not and cannot indicate structural abnormalities in the brain. It just measures current brain activity, as revealed by the flow of magnetically-charged oxygenated blood through the brain. It tells us these people's brains are currently behaving differently from control subjects' brains. Which, it seems to me, is stating the bleeding obvious.

The law locks up the man or woman,

Who steals the goose from off the common,

But leaves the greater villain loose,

Who steals the common from off the goose

The law demands that we atone,

When we take things we do not own,

But leaves the lords and ladies fine,

Who take things that are yours and mine

The poor and wretched don't escape,

If they conspire the law to break,

This must be so but they endure,

Those who conspire to make the law

The law locks up the man or woman,

Who steals the goose from off the common,

And geese will still a common lack,

Till they go and steal it back

- 17th century English folk poem, post Enclosure Acts

It also continues to farm human beings. Tens of thousands of human beings each year are murdered to order (or, more accurately, they have their organs cut out and then are left to die) for Western transplant tourists who will pay upwards of $100k for the prime cuts.

They and their medical systems and governments know full well that a heart transplant scheduled on a particular date three months in advance admits of no pleasant explanations. But nobody cares.

China Tribunal judgement (2020): https://chinatribunal.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/ChinaTr...

2022 update from Ethan Gutmann (who wrote one of the major early reports): https://chrissmith.house.gov/uploadedfiles/gutmann_-_witness...

What do you mean by 'cancel', outside the context of blacklisting entertainers? How does that apply to a CEO? Presumably anyone considering employing or funding him is entitled (and likely competent) to read the facts and others' thoughts about them.

I think the point about 'multiple accusers' is fair. People will come out of the woodwork, especially when there's money at stake (from the press or from legal action). Michael Jackson is a good example: undoubtedly he did rape some of those kids, but not all of them. Still, I don't see why this provides an argument against forming an opinion, rather than one for forming opinions judiciously.

Also, look up Jesse Washington if you want to understand what lynching means.

So what if it’s tremendous[ly] depressing? It’s depressing that basically no animal dies of old age in the wild. It’s still the reality.

Your comment doesn’t really seem to be trying to substantiate your claim, so much as it’s trying to paint a picture of how depressing his description of reality is. From that, I’m pretty confident you’re trying to define some ideal definition of love – which, if he’s correct, would not be ‘wrong’ but would simply not be common in the real world – while he’s trying to factually describe the motivations for human relationships in the real world.

(I’m not sure I quite agree with his gloomy picture, but I don’t think you are even coming at it with the same intent.)

It's not just the strict denotative meaning. It's also the valence and emphasis of the statement. It doesn't concentrate the mind on "what if it disappears?", but on "how likely is it to disappear?", to which the (supposed; bullshit) answer is 'not likely'. Someone might - on rational analysis - know what it means, and still come away with a better impression than if they said it outright.

Yeah, a genius heroin addict friend of mine drew a molecular structure for a new opioid[0] on the back of a napkin and sent it off to a synthetic chemist in China to be synthesised. To my infinite horror I actually tried a dose of what came back, at the same time as he took his dose, and in the recommended (high!) dosage of what I think was a decent chunk of a gramme. Luckily it worked. I can well see how someone could have the confidence to try something as mild as ibuprofen.

[0] Or pseudo-opioid, I'm not sure. He's a biologist and I'm not a natural scientist at all. All I recall is that it was a positive allosteric modulator of the mu opioid receptor, which, by and large, may as well be Greek to me.

In the same vein, I was discussing police responses to mass shootings on Twitter, and was quite surprised to find Wikipedia took me to a disambiguation page when looking up “[random small town] shooting”: https://twitter.com/samziz/status/1544460684829904896

The Wikipedia page is a bit better in giving the actual details in which the story is incorrect, and without the extended editorialising (though the final sentence is quite nightmarish even in its blankly factual wording):

Because of the layout of the complex and the fact that the attacks took place in different locations, no witness saw the entire sequence of events. Investigation by police and prosecutors showed that approximately a dozen individuals had heard or seen portions of the attack, though none saw or was aware of the entire incident.[67] Only one witness, Joseph Fink, was aware Genovese was stabbed in the first attack, and only Karl Ross was aware of it in the second attack. Many were entirely unaware that an assault or homicide had taken place; some thought what they saw or heard was a domestic quarrel, a drunken brawl or a group of friends leaving the bar when Moseley first approached Genovese.[8] After the initial attack punctured her lungs, leading to her eventual death from asphyxiation, it is unlikely that Genovese was able to scream at any volume.[68]

And some slightly overlapping details in an article from which it quotes:

The article grossly exaggerated the number of witnesses and what they had perceived. None saw the attack in its entirety. Only a few had glimpsed parts of it, or recognized the cries for help. Many thought they had heard lovers or drunks quarreling. There were two attacks, not three. And afterward, two people did call the police. A 70-year-old woman ventured out and cradled the dying victim in her arms until they arrived. Ms. Genovese died on the way to a hospital.

Not to mention Damien Hirst (and I suppose Warhol's 'factory' was the real pioneer). I don't understand it. My friend has a bunch of 'his' paintings - high six figures a pop at the very least - which look like things you could buy at IKEA (e.g. this one: https://imgur.com/a/TfPci2c).

I mean, a friend of mine was an escort, and certainly ended up in entanglements like that. At the end of the day you are two human beings. Whatever your professional situation, these things are inexorable.

Well, this is bad news for the existence of infosec professionals...

What do you mean ‘a civil law issue and not a common law issue’? The UK’s civil laws[0] are very largely composed of common law; the two concepts are orthogonal, not opposites, and both or one or neither can easily be true at once.

A common law issue could be either civil or criminal and says nothing about whether it’s the police’s domain (which obviously would entail its being criminal law).

[0] In the only one of two ways that you could possibly be using the word ‘civil’ in this context, given we don’t have a civil law legal tradition.

Yes. They can delete it, they can create it, they can mutate it. That’s how it works when you send information about yourself to somebody else for them to store on their hard drives. This is true utterly irrespective of whether they in fact delete it (or do any other of those things).

Yeah, I'm not sure non-Londoners appreciate this. The escalators at Angel (where I grew up) go 60m deep. Someone skiied down them and hit 30mph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_tube_station#Escalator_s... https://youtu.be/rlF4nRUbKmc?t=53.

Jesus, that thing looks like Lamborghini designed a tank…

But, like they said, it's talking about the legal reality and not the moral reality. I find it hard to see how that could be either factually or morally wrong.

NOTE: I can't now edit this comment, but I wanted to clarify, per below, that many of these issues are more about my experience of Cassandra in the specific context in which I experienced it, and not the database itself. It's a complex tool, but, for the constituency of users for whom it's appropriate, it's as competently architected as just about any other database. My criticisms mostly centre on the culture of engineering teams which choose to use a very complicated tool that requires significant skill, in contexts where it's simply not needed.

Yeah, I 100% agree that many of those problems are inherent to distributed databases. There are an interesting few which kinda straddle the line in that respect – stuff like counters and the aforementioned individually tunable consistency, where it makes it too easy for (in practice) individual engineers to trigger classic dist-sys failure modes – but largely its problems are the problems of distributed systems. Lots of its other problems are the problems of using an over-complex eventually-consistent write-optimal (etc) distributed system for a problem that doesn't require it (where e.g. Redis Cluster would be far better). I'd submit to throw maybe a few on top: it feels like a general theme of many incidents we encountered was around "we did something complex/accidentally-pathological and Cassandra froze up entirely due to [consistency / compaction / repair / GC] stuff". It did feel from many of those issues like it was a victim of its own complexity, more than anything else. (That theme also applies to lots of the 'operator errors'.)

Also, sorry, I think I was a bit unfair to Java. I'm not an anti-GC militant. I'd be the first person to point out the haziness of the distinction between tracing and (say) reference counting in the first place, or indeed with the indexing/defragmentation/etc space + work required of a malloc implementation. I'd consider a GCed language like Go - though I personally hate it and feel it utterly joyless - to be an improvement. It's more about the inherent complexity of adding a p-code machine like the JVM on top of the already-colossal complexity of a modern database. For what it's worth, for clarity, I've barely written any Java and I'm intimately unfamiliar with Java development, and despite giving my opinion I'm well aware it's not a very informed one. I do agree with your point about its isolating the 'unit' of your software from the particularities of any given hardware and making it more easily jepsenable - I hadn't considered that. And some of the stuff happening in the Java space, like Graal and (as you say) Loom, is very impressive.

I'll amend my original comment to make it a bit clearer that most of this is not really Cassandra's fault, and its faults aren't really more numerous and more severe than those of any other database. It's evidently a huge success and its value to people is undeniable - I don't mean to depreciate your work. I forget that there's a non-negligible chance of relevant people reading my comments on here (like, less congenially, the time I accidentally summoned Br*ndan E*ch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28792436). I don't work with Cassandra any more, so I'm probably unlikely to have many practical questions, but thanks for the offer and I'll certainly reach out if I find myself in that space again! Really appreciate your being so magnanimous about my not-very-magnanimous (pusillanimous?) comment.

His initials were LT, if that helps (if not, I can clarify his whole name over email or however people privately communicate on HN?). I may well be exaggerating his 'major'ness - I'm not that familiar with the Cassandra contributorship, but that was my understanding from my team!

As for Cassandra itself, we were certainly quite sophisticated users. There's a decent chance you'd know the company in question. It's a fair point about the language: I'm not a fan of Java and it probably colours my opinion a little; I was speaking more from a philosophical standpoint about reducing the theoretical complexity of software to make it more deterministic & understandable (out of the tar pit and all that), more than to any specific deficiencies in Java that caused any actual issues for us, of which there were no direct examples I can recall. (Pathological GC did cause some occasional degradation, I suppose, though at best that's semi-specific to Java.)

I think most of the actual issues, from my on-call years, were as a result of stuff like: (as I mentioned) anticompaction and suchlike causing pathological performance; our own misconfiguration of things like asynchronous replication / bootstrapping (which once caused a very severe incident, as in 'endemic data corruption and loss' severity); application-layer issues from product engineers misconfiguring consistency, choosing poor keys for partitioning, constructing poor data models that require table scans, all the ordinary stuff for which Cassandra is at most very obliquely to blame.

Also, I agree it was stupid of us to use Cassandra in (what was) a very serious environment, in probably one of the most safety-critical sectors outside of medicine and rockets. We knew that. We did the same with several technologies. Literally, we had a diktat saying no engineers could mention it in blog posts. On reflection it's quite unfair to blame Cassandra for our decision - to a large extent, yeah, we were holding it very wrong. I would not have made that choice myself, at all.

far easier to run than Cassandra

I know precisely nothing about Scylla, but somehow I still agree with this. Cassandra is far and away the most horrendous software I've ever had to work with (Kafka coming in a close second). This was true even when we hired a major core contributor to help manage it; even he wasn't 100% comfortable with it. The word 'anticompaction' is still enough to give me nightmares.

I very much welcome – not that it's Cassandra's only problem – this trend of rewriting '00s/early-'10s Java software in simpler languages. (And, languages aside, I think Cassandra - certainly inter alia - simply sits at a level of complexity which is beyond the comprehension of any one human being. And software which is beyond the comprehension of any one human being inevitably begets bugs, even as an operator rather than a developer.)

Eh, I was semi-addicted to heroin, and I can testify - hell, I can give you a list of usernames from memory - that that's absolutely endemic on Wickr. It's the #1 go-to location for it[0]. It's not just 'virtuous' stuff like medical marijuana and abortion pills. I wasn't remotely surprised to read any of this.

And I will bet you, at any odds you like, that the harms done by heroin (uh, 'medical diamorphine') and other opioids outstrip the few virtuous uses a hundredfold.

[0] Perhaps second to the so-called dark web, though that serves a discovery purpose which is a bit orthogonal (and complementary) to Wickr.

Powerful people have long weaponised self-deprecation as a means of letting off steam and blunting more serious attacks. (That theme is elaborated very well in the LRB here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n14/jonathan-coe/sinking....) Michael Bloomberg is actually a great example, in how his campaign relied so heavily on irony and self-deprecation to defuse the (anticipated) discomfort around electing an old white billionaire.

The most fundamental tenet of capitalism. Capitalism's most fundamental tenant, on the other hand, is probably Starbucks.

I think you could then count on the expectation that, as they say, 'not a jury in the land'...

Yeah, I worked at a UK bank and was given gardening leave even when I left to start a (somewhat orthogonal) competitor. Actually, they didn't even insist that I served out my leave before starting work. It's an odd system.

I was addicted to heroin, I’m intimately acquainted with the harms of drugs. Whether I or anyone else wants to control others is entirely separate from the question of whether it does harm. And, incidentally, however inarticulably agonising is heroin withdrawal, I suffered far less than those at - or near - the other end of the production chain. Don’t give me this shit about how drug production harms no one just because you like taking them. Tell it to the Colombian fishermen who get a bullet in the head after unwittingly ferrying a package. Tell it to the people strung up off bridges. Tell it to the countless dead.

(I don’t think drugs should be banned or controlled, for what it’s worth. I believe in pragmatic policies of harm reduction. I’m just not going to deny reality, and the harms this system causes.)

I don’t quite get this simulation/execution distinction. Consciousness is a function, not an entity. To simulate a function is precisely to execute it. There’s no meaningful distinction whatever. (It’s the second-order distinction between simulating/executing an x86 processor in the abstract, vs simulating/executing a specific identified Intel chip product, if you like.)

I agree with what I think you mean, but ‘feels sentient’ is almost catastrophically poor wording. Something that feels [to you, an outside observer] sentient is not necessarily sentient. Something that feels [itself] sentient certainly is, because that’s the literal meaning of sentience (or if by ‘sentient’ you mean something like ‘existing as a subject’, then.. the cogito and all that).